2024 spitzack port townsend tree study woodcut print woodblock mokuhanga seattle art artist relief printmaking lino linocut

A companion to his Fort Worden tree studies, this 2024 mokuhanga turns to the wider environs of Port Townsend, the Victorian-era port town adjacent to the fort on the Olympic Peninsula. The subject — an individual tree, isolated for sustained observation — places the print within the kacho-e and tree-study tradition while applying that lineage to a specific Pacific Northwest setting. Producing a focused tree portrait in water-based woodblock requires careful management of foliage masses, where the artist must decide which branches and leaf clusters merit their own block and which can be absorbed into broader color fields. Spitzack would likely have used baren-burnished registration to keep edges crisp where bark meets sky, with bokashi gradients softening the transitions of light through the canopy. The Port Townsend study extends the regional documentary impulse of his Fort Worden work, and reflects a broader tendency among American mokuhanga artists to use the medium for plein-air-derived studies of local ecology rather than imported subjects.