Pamela Wolfe

A mokuhanga portrait of New Zealand painter Pamela Wolfe, known for floral still life. Reed's portrait technique reduces the likeness to carved planes of tone rather than descriptive line, the keyblock providing structural drawing while colour or grey blocks supply background, hair and any second hue. [Bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradations across the face are produced by brushing graded [sumi](/glossary/sumi) onto the dampened block before each impression and burnishing the [washi](/glossary/washi) by hand with a [baren](/glossary/baren); the water-based pigment sinks into the paper, giving a matte and slightly diffused edge that distinguishes mokuhanga from oil-based relief. Aligned with the 2021 IMC sumi conference in Nara, the palette is likely concentrated in black. Within Reed's wider portrait sequence of New Zealand artists, the image of Wolfe — a painter of carefully observed botanical subjects — translates a representational painter into the disciplined planar carved-block idiom of mokuhanga, a Japanese tradition Reed has spent decades practising and teaching.