Nicky Foreman

Reed's portrait of Nicky Foreman forms part of a series in which fellow practitioners are translated into mokuhanga, the traditional Japanese water-based woodblock technique. The print is most likely a head-and-shoulders likeness, with the subject's features distributed across multiple blocks for separate registration—a process where each block carries either a tonal value or a discrete passage of the composition, brought together through repeated [baren](/glossary/baren) impressions on dampened [washi](/glossary/washi). Mokuhanga's character lies in its capacity for tonal gradation, particularly [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi), where pigment is graded across the block face to produce transitions difficult to achieve in oil-based relief. The 2021 International Mokuhanga Conference in Nara, where Reed exhibited, took [sumi](/glossary/sumi) black ink as its theme, reinforcing the discipline's reliance on density and gradient over color contrast. The Foreman portrait, like its siblings in the series, sits within this disciplinary conversation while documenting an individual identity—a record of one artist's likeness made in the materials of another tradition.