John Blackburn

Titled for John Blackburn, this mokuhanga functions as a dedication to the British abstract painter (b. 1932) whose late-career work explores reduced palettes, gestural mark, and the material qualities of paint and ground. The translation of such an idiom into mokuhanga is suggestive rather than direct: the Japanese water-based woodblock medium produces flat printed planes, sharply registered through kentō, that resist gestural facsimile but reward compositional restraint. [Sumi](/glossary/sumi) has particular affinity with abstract painterly idioms grounded in tonal restriction, and Reed's prints of the early 2020s, when he exhibited at the 2021 IMC in Nara, return repeatedly to its expressive range. The procedure remains traditional: cherry blocks carved and inked with brush, pigments bound with rice paste, [washi](/glossary/washi) dampened and burnished with a [baren](/glossary/baren). Within that discipline, the carved line of the key block carries the principal drawn structure of the image.