
Brendan Burns
by Michael Reed
- Image courtesy of
- Artist website (Michael Reed)
Description
Named for Brendan Burns, the Welsh painter whose works on canvas and paper draw on the coastal landscape of Pembrokeshire, this mokuhanga continues Reed's pattern of titling individual prints after particular artists. Burns's painterly idiom — saturated, gestural, attentive to weather and tide — sits at some distance from the registered planes that mokuhanga produces, and the act of naming a print for such a painter foregrounds the translation between media that mokuhanga always undertakes when it engages painterly source material. Reed's printing follows the traditional water-based method: cherry blocks carved and registered with kentō, pigments bound with rice paste, dampened [washi](/glossary/washi) pulled across the inked block by hand with a [baren](/glossary/baren). [Bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) transitions, ranging from saturated [sumi](/glossary/sumi) through translucent grey, allow the printmaker to evoke atmosphere without departing from the medium's flat economy. Reed exhibited at the 2021 IMC in Nara, whose juried exhibition responded to the theme of sumi.



