snack time lion animal cookie spitzack woodblock woodcut mokuhanga print printmaking washi seattle art

Title points to a lion-shaped animal cracker — Barnum's Animals or a similar mass-produced cookie — rendered at scale through mokuhanga. The subject takes a familiar small object and gives it monumental treatment, a strategy that descends from Pop Art's interest in the everyday but here filtered through the painstaking woodblock medium. The lion cracker's textured surface, with its embossed mane, eye, and outline, presents a printmaking challenge: the artist must translate three-dimensional relief into flat color areas with carefully cut blocks. Mokuhanga's water-based pigments soaking into washi can suggest the porous, baked surface of the cookie itself, reading almost as trompe-l'oeil. The Animals tag connects this print to a thread of zoological imagery in Spitzack's catalog, though here filtered through commercial graphic design. As contemporary American mokuhanga, the work demonstrates how a tradition rooted in flora, fauna, and famous places (kacho-e and meisho-e) can be turned to objects of consumer culture without losing its meditative production rhythm.