CA sunset woodblock woodcut Japanese mokuhanga print printmaking washi seattle art fine art seattle printmaker nw printmaking

A California sunset rendered in the mokuhanga tradition, where bokashi gradation is a technique closely associated with sky and atmosphere. The print likely shows a horizon band of warm color graded into cooler blues above, achieved by brushing pigment across the block with a hake brush before each impression. Sunset compositions in the Japanese print tradition trace back through Hokusai and Hiroshige, where the meisho-e genre often used a horizontal format to give the sky compositional weight. As a Pacific Northwest artist depicting California, Spitzack steps outside his typical regional subject matter while maintaining the technical vocabulary—water-based pigments on washi, layered transparent impressions—that defines his practice. The print belongs to a body of work in which landscape observation drives compositional decisions, with the carved blocks serving as the means by which a specific evening sky is translated into a reproducible image.