Summer by Eva Pietzcker - Davidson Galleries

Summer is part of a series in which Pietzcker treats the four seasons as a sustained subject, a thematic structure with deep precedent in both East Asian and European landscape printmaking. Working in mokuhanga, she uses water-based pigments and absorbent [washi](/glossary/washi) to register multiple impressions from cherrywood blocks pulled by hand with a [baren](/glossary/baren), a process that allows for soft tonal layering rather than the hard-edged graphic effects of oil-based Western relief printing. [Bokashi](/glossary/bokashi), the gradated wash applied directly to the block, is well suited to summer atmospherics, whether of dense foliage, water surfaces under flat midday light, or distant haze along a horizon. The work belongs to Pietzcker's broader practice of distilling landscapes she has encountered in the American West, the Berlin region, and Scandinavia into compositions that retain the pictorial economy of Japanese tradition while drawing their motifs from her own travel and residence. Her seasonal prints function less as illustrations of named places than as records of a particular quality of light and air.