Suzuki (Japan) right panel by Eva Pietzcker - Davidson Galleries

The parenthetical Japan and the right panel designation indicate this print is part of a multi-panel work referencing a specific Japanese location. Multi-panel prints — diptychs and triptychs — have a long history in Japanese printmaking, from Edo-period kabuki triptychs to Meiji-era landscape diptychs. As a right panel, this sheet would have been designed to read with one or more companion sheets, with compositional elements — a horizon line, a watercourse, a tree line — continuing across the registration. Pietzcker's training at Nagasawa Art Park in 2003 and her artist-in-residence stay in Tsuna-town in 2004 gave her direct experience of Japanese landscapes, and this print likely emerges from that engagement. The technical demands of multi-panel mokuhanga — consistent registration across separate sheets, color matching across separate impressions of each block — make such works a test of carving and printing discipline as much as composition. The right-panel format also draws on the conventions of asymmetric pictorial weighting familiar from Edo landscape series.