Karhu [Self-portrait]

Karhu's self-portrait in woodblock form — made in 1980, when he was fifty-three and had lived in Kyoto for over two decades — presents the artist as he had become: an American who was also irreducibly himself, looking out from a composition that bears all the marks of his mature printmaking style. The self-portrait as woodblock print is an unusual form in the Western tradition but entirely natural within a Japanese context, and Karhu's willingness to use it suggests how fully he had absorbed the medium's expressive possibilities. The work is both document and statement.