Bruce Hunt

Part of Michael Reed's portrait series rendering named contemporary artists in mokuhanga, this print bears the name of the New Zealand realist painter Bruce Hunt, known for atmospheric South Island landscapes. Reed's portrait works in the medium translate likeness through the constraints of carved keyblock and color blocks, where each plane of the face must be reduced to a discrete shape registered to the next. Produced in the period leading up to the 2021 International Mokuhanga Conference in Nara — whose theme was sumi, black ink — works like this engage the conference focus by leaning on the tonal range achievable through pure black on washi: bokashi gradations brushed across the block, the velvety deposit of pigment laid down by the baren, and the compression of facial modeling into ink density rather than line alone. The result functions both as a likeness of a fellow artist and as a meditation on sumi's capacity to carry weight, volume, and attention across a single sheet.