Yakama by Eva Pietzcker - Davidson Galleries

Yakama takes its title from the Yakama Valley region of Washington State, suggesting a landscape view of the Pacific Northwest territory characterized by wide plains and distant mountain ranges. Pietzcker's North American landscape prints typically depict expansive vistas with horizontal compositions, using bokashi gradation to render the atmospheric distance between near vegetation and far hills. The mokuhanga technique she trained in at Nagasawa Art Park in 2003 allows her to build subtle tonal transitions in sky and earth without hard outlines, working water-based pigments into dampened washi with the baren. This print belongs to her ongoing body of landscape work documenting locations she has visited, a contemplative approach inherited from the Japanese meisho-e tradition of place-prints. Like her German and Japanese contemporaries in the contemporary mokuhanga movement, Pietzcker treats specific terrain as a subject worth recording with the same attention historical printmakers gave to Edo or the Tokaido road, translating Western landscape sensibilities through an Eastern technical vocabulary.