Hamish Foote

Hamish Foote is a New Zealand painter known for naturalist works addressing botanical and ornithological subjects; this portrait places him within Reed's series of mokuhanga depictions of fellow artists. The single-name title indicates the print is a likeness rather than a scene, and the medium's reliance on carved blocks rather than directly applied pigment necessitates a stylized rendering of facial structure. Mokuhanga's water-based inks, absorbed into washi rather than sitting on its surface, produce a chromatic depth that contrasts with the harder optical character of oil-based relief prints. Working under the 2021 IMC's sumi theme in Nara, Reed would have confined the print primarily to tonal black, exploring how density variations across a single pigment can describe planes and shadow. The portrait series reads as a translation exercise: artists primarily associated with painting, sculpture, and ceramics rendered into a printmaking idiom whose lineage runs from the eighteenth century through to the IMC community.