Sunrise, Western Meadowlark by Eva Pietzcker - Davidson Galleries

Sunrise, Western Meadowlark depicts the Western Meadowlark, a yellow-breasted songbird native to grasslands of the American West, set against a dawn sky. The composition extends the [kacho-e](/glossary/kacho-e) (bird-and-flower) tradition into Pietzcker's adopted North American subject matter, capturing the bird perched amid prairie grasses as the horizon glows. Such subjects allow for extensive use of [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi), the graduated tonal printing achieved by inking the woodblock with a damp brush and pulling the impression by hand with a [baren](/glossary/baren), to render atmospheric transitions from violet to amber across the sky. Printed on absorbent [washi](/glossary/washi) using water-based pigments, the work demonstrates how Pietzcker has adapted the mokuhanga technique she studied at the Nagasawa Art Park Program in 2003 to depict species and landscapes outside the traditional Japanese repertoire. The print reflects her ongoing project of using a specifically Japanese material vocabulary to record the natural world she encounters during travels through the American West and northern Europe.