Untitled

This fifth untitled print reflects the color-application practices specific to mokuhanga. Unlike Western relief printers who work from pre-mixed inks rolled onto the block with a brayer, mokuhanga artists apply pigment with a brush directly to the dampened block surface, blending it with rice paste at the moment of printing. This allows for [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) — graduated transitions of color produced by varying the pigment density across the block before each impression. Bokashi is the technique most associated with the atmospheric skies of Hiroshige's landscapes, but contemporary practitioners apply it to abstract and non-representational work as readily as to representational subjects. Pittman's selection for the International Mokuhanga Conference Americas exhibition indicates her facility with these technical traditions and her engagement with the global community of practitioners who have taken up mokuhanga in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.