Here and Now

The title invokes the Zen-inflected attentiveness to present experience that has shaped much of Stewart's image-making during his decades in Kyoto. The mokuhanga technique suits this sensibility: each impression of pigment from a carved block onto [washi](/glossary/washi) is a discrete, irreversible act, and the medium rewards close observation rather than gesture. The work likely depicts a quiet still life, an interior detail, or a small architectural fragment — the kind of subject Stewart has favored across his etching and watercolor practice, where the focus is on how light falls across a surface rather than on narrative content. Mokuhanga's water-based pigments allow soft, absorbent passages and hand-burnished [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradations that differ in feel from the harder edges of oil-based relief printing. Exhibited at Hangaten, the print sits within the Kyoto international woodblock community that has, since the late twentieth century, expanded the medium beyond its [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) origins into contemporary, often introspective subject matter.