Josh Olley

Bearing the name of Josh Olley, this sheet sits in Michael Reed's mokuhanga portrait series of contemporary artists, where each subject is translated into the constraints of carved block and water-based pigment on washi. The medium's particular character — the visible fiber of the paper, the soft edge where color blocks register against one another, the dense black laid down by the baren over a sumi-charged keyblock — gives Reed's portraits a tactile surface distinct from intaglio or screenprint portraiture. The series engages the historical conventions of Japanese woodblock portraiture, which centered on actors and beauties, by redirecting them toward the painter, sculptor, or printmaker as sitter. Reed exhibited in the juried international show at the 2021 International Mokuhanga Conference in Nara, where the conference theme of sumi shaped contemporary mokuhanga toward an investigation of black ink's capacities. Compositional reduction, controlled bokashi, and the registration of color planes against a sumi keyblock are the technical vocabulary through which the likeness is made to settle on the sheet.