2023 spitzack stay flexible woodcut woodblock mokuhanga seattle art artist print printmaking palm tree mountain ocean waves

This 2023 mokuhanga combines a palm tree, mountain, and ocean waves under the title "stay flexible," assembling a tropical landscape vocabulary into what reads as a meditation on resilience. The composition draws on the meisho-e tradition of integrating distinct landscape elements — rock, water, vegetation — into a unified pictorial space, here transposed from Japanese coastal scenery to a more generalized Pacific or equatorial setting. Producing such an image in water-based woodblock involves layering separate blocks for sky gradient, mountain mass, ocean swell, and palm fronds, with bokashi commonly used to render atmospheric depth between distant peaks and foreground sea. The palm — whose namesake flexibility supplies the title's metaphor — would likely have required a dedicated block for its fronds, registered against the background landscape. As one of the earlier prints in Spitzack's recent body of work, the piece anticipates the more focused subject studies of 2024 while demonstrating his comfort moving between landscape and still-life modes within the constraints of the mokuhanga process.