Elizabeth Rees

This print from Michael Reed's portrait series takes Elizabeth Rees as its subject, joining a body of mokuhanga works in which the artist records named contemporary practitioners through the carved block. Each portrait proceeds through the standard mokuhanga sequence — keyblock drawn and cut, color blocks cut and registered to [kento](/glossary/kento) marks, sheets dampened and pulled by hand with the [baren](/glossary/baren) — and depends on the technical disciplines of the medium for its character: the soft fiber surface of [washi](/glossary/washi), the controlled bleed of water-based pigment into that fiber, and the [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradations brushed onto the block where continuous tone would otherwise be unavailable. Reed's selection for the juried international exhibition at the 2021 International Mokuhanga Conference in Nara placed work like this within a global discussion of mokuhanga centered on the conference theme of [sumi](/glossary/sumi). Black ink, in that context, is treated less as outline and more as a primary structural medium capable of carrying the modeling and weight of a portrait on its own.