San Juan Islands by Eva Pietzcker - Davidson Galleries

San Juan Islands depicts the archipelago in the northwest corner of Washington State, a landscape of forested islands separated by tidal channels off the Pacific Northwest coast. The subject sits within Pietzcker's recurring engagement with shorelines, water, and boreal landscapes of the northern hemisphere, drawing on her travels through the American West. The composition registers the islands as layered silhouettes against water and sky, a structure well served by the mokuhanga technique: [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradations applied to cherrywood blocks with a damp brush yield the atmospheric distances of overlapping land masses, while the grain of the wood itself can read through the impression. Printed on [washi](/glossary/washi) with water-based pigments and pulled by hand with a [baren](/glossary/baren), the work belongs to a broader project in which Pietzcker brings specific Pacific Northwest, Scandinavian, and Berlin-region landscapes into a Japanese material vocabulary she studied during her 2003 Nagasawa Art Park residency. Davidson Galleries, based in Seattle, represents Pietzcker, which makes regional Pacific Northwest subjects a recurring strand in the output she shares with that gallery.