2024 spitzack fort worden tree study woodcut print woodblock mokuhanga seattle art artist relief printmaking lino linocut

This 2024 tree study was made at Fort Worden, the former coastal artillery installation on the Quimper Peninsula in Washington State now functioning as a state park. Tree studies occupy a specific niche within mokuhanga: they invite the artist to translate the irregular silhouettes of bark, branch, and foliage into the discrete color fields the medium demands, producing a kind of botanical portraiture grounded in Pacific Northwest ecology rather than the pines and willows of classical Japanese precedent. Spitzack would have separated trunk, canopy, and ground plane across multiple blocks, with bokashi gradations likely used to suggest the dappled light filtering through Fort Worden's stand of mature conifers and broadleaves. The work belongs to a series of site-specific tree studies that situate his practice within a regional vocabulary while drawing on the meisho-e tradition of place-based imagery. As an American artist recognized at the 2024 International Mokuhanga Conference, Spitzack uses these landscape-rooted prints to extend the genre into a contemporary North American idiom.