Anton Hart

Reed's portrait of Anton Hart belongs to a series of mokuhanga likenesses of fellow practitioners, exhibited in connection with the 2021 International Mokuhanga Conference in Nara. The print depicts the subject as a single-name title implies—a focused likeness rather than a narrative composition—and is built up through the registration of multiple carved blocks, each carrying a tonal value or compositional passage. Hand-pulled with a baren on dampened washi using water-based pigments, the impression embeds rather than coats the paper, giving the surface a matte, absorbed quality distinct from oil-based relief prints. The IMC's 2021 theme of sumi would have foregrounded black ink as the primary tonal register, with bokashi gradations carrying modulation across the sitter's features. Across the series, Reed engages with mokuhanga's capacity to translate contemporary likeness into a medium historically aligned with bijin-ga, yakusha-e, and meisho-e—genres rooted in the Edo period yet still active within the international community of practitioners that the IMC convenes.