Margaret Lovell

A portrait identifying its subject by personal name. The British sculptor Margaret Lovell, born 1939, is known for figurative bronzes; if the print depicts her, it locates Reed's mokuhanga practice in the tradition of artist-portraying-artist, with the printmaker engaging a peer working in another medium. Mokuhanga's water-based pigments and hand-burnished impressions onto absorbent kozo washi yield a soft-edged tonal surface that differs markedly from etched or lithographed portraiture and rewards subjects with strong facial structure and sculptural presence. The 2021 IMC sumi-themed juried exhibition in Nara emphasized prints worked in carbon ink, where the absence of color shifts attention to the carved line, the paper's texture, and the gradient potential of bokashi shading cut into the block. Reed's inclusion among the international participants reflects the geographic range of contemporary mokuhanga, with North American practitioners contributing alongside Japanese, European, and Australasian colleagues to a community organized through the triennial conference.