warm days cool nights woodblock woodcut Japanese mokuhanga print printmaking washi seattle art fine printmaker nw printmaking relief prints tree moon color woodcut contemporary artist pnw seattle print arts

Image courtesy of: Artist website (Charles Spitzack)

Description

A nocturnal landscape print pairing the warmth of day with the cool of evening through a moon-and-trees composition. The juxtaposition implied by the title suggests Spitzack uses bokashi gradation—a technique central to mokuhanga where pigment is graded across a single block during printing—to render the transition between sky temperatures and the diffused glow of moonlight through foliage. Water-based pigments printed on washi allow the soft, layered color fields the moon motif requires, where opaque oil-based inks would flatten the effect. Trees rendered as silhouetted shapes against a graded ground are a recurring device in contemporary mokuhanga, drawing from a tradition of nocturnal landscapes explored by Hasui and Yoshida. As an American practitioner working in the Pacific Northwest, Spitzack engages with this lineage while bringing regional vegetation and atmospheric conditions to bear on the format.

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More Moonlight Prints

Mount Fuji on a Moonlit Night, Kawai Bridge (Tsukiyo no Fuji [Kawaibashi]), from the series "Selection of Views of the Tokaido (Tokaido fukei senshu)"

1947

Color woodblock print; oban

Evening Moon at Nakanoshima, Sapporo (Sapporo Nakanoshima no yuzuki), from the series "Collection of Views of Japan, Eastern Japan Edition (Nihon fukei shu higashi Nihon hen)"

March 1933

Color woodblock print; oban

Matsushima in Moonlight (Tsuki no Matsushima)

1919

Color woodblock print

Kiyozumi Garden in Moonlight

January 1938

Woodblock print, ink and color on paper

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warm days cool nights woodblock woodcut Japanese mokuhanga print printmaking washi seattle art fine printmaker nw printmaking relief prints tree moon color woodcut contemporary artist pnw seattle print arts was created by Charles Spitzack.