2024 spitzack fort a parrot with a proposal flower woodcut print woodblock mokuhanga seattle art artist relief printmaking lino linocut

This 2024 print depicts a parrot offering a flower, a composition that engages directly with the kacho-e ("flower-and-bird") tradition that has been central to Japanese woodblock printing since the eighteenth century. The narrative element — the bird as suitor presenting a bloom — adds a small anthropomorphic gesture not typical of historical kacho-e, which more often treated birds as observed natural specimens. In water-based mokuhanga, rendering the saturated plumage of a parrot demands a sequence of color blocks layered to build up the bird's chromatic intensity without losing the transparency that distinguishes the medium from oil-based relief. Spitzack would likely have reserved the brightest pigments for the parrot itself, allowing the flower and ground to occupy quieter tonal registers. The print extends his engagement with the kacho-e genre — present elsewhere in his 2024 work in butterfly and floral subjects — and demonstrates how American practitioners recognized at the International Mokuhanga Conference are continuing to work within the genre's traditional categories while introducing their own pictorial sensibilities.