Untitled

A further untitled work from Pittman's mokuhanga practice. The medium accommodates a wide range of pictorial approaches — abstract, representational, landscape, figurative — and contemporary practitioners outside Japan have used it for purposes that depart substantially from the [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) subject categories of [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga), [yakusha-e](/glossary/yakusha-e), and [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e). What links the contemporary work to its historical forebears is the physical process: a multi-block sequence in which each color and tonal area is carved separately, registered with [kento](/glossary/kento) marks, and printed by hand pressure through the baren onto washi prepared with sizing or applied dampened. The resulting impressions retain the slight irregularities of hand printing — minor registration shifts, variation in pigment density across the sheet, the embossed impression of the block edge — that distinguish them from machine-printed reproductions. Pittman's IMC 2024 selection places this practice within an internationally networked field.