Dark Clouds by Eva Pietzcker - Davidson Galleries

Dark Clouds is a mokuhanga sky study, a subject suited to the technique that Pietzcker has worked in since her 2003 training at the Nagasawa Art Park Program on Awaji Island. Cloud forms in mokuhanga depend on [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) — pigment graduated by brush across a dampened block before printing — and on the way successive impressions through the [baren](/glossary/baren) build atmospheric depth on washi without solid outlines. Pietzcker carves her own cherry blocks and prints by hand from her Berlin studio, registering each color through [kento](/glossary/kento) marks rather than mechanical registration. Where late Meiji and Showa [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) landscapists like Hasui used dark sky as a foil for lit foreground, Pietzcker tends to let weather dominate the composition, omitting figures and architectural anchors. Within her wider body of work the print sits alongside other studies of European and Pacific Northwest skies in which the subject is reduced to mass, light and edge — an austere, contemporary extension of the [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e) landscape tradition into non-Japanese geography.