J.S. Parker

Named for J.S. Parker, the New Zealand abstract painter whose late work pursued chromatic structure across modular panels, this sheet from Michael Reed's mokuhanga portrait series translates a fellow artist into the disciplined language of carved block and water-based pigment. The portrait sits within an ongoing project that records named contemporary artists through the keyblock and color blocks of the Japanese woodblock tradition, pulled by hand on dampened [washi](/glossary/washi) with the [baren](/glossary/baren). Parker's own painting privileged structure, color, and surface; rendering him in mokuhanga inverts that vocabulary toward the discrete plane, the registered edge, and the absorbed pigment of the printed sheet. Reed exhibited at the 2021 International Mokuhanga Conference in Nara, an event whose theme of [sumi](/glossary/sumi) directed contemporary practitioners toward the expressive possibilities of black ink — the [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradation brushed across a block, the weight of dense sumi pulled onto washi, and the unprinted paper as an active compositional element rather than mere ground.