Aspen grove

Aspen grove departs from Lyon's better-known portrait practice to take up a vertical landscape subject — the slender, pale trunks of an aspen stand rendered through mokuhanga's layered impressions. Aspens, with their bone-white bark scored by dark eye-shaped scars, lend themselves to the medium's economy: large fields of unprinted washi can register as bark, with sumi-toned key blocks carrying the branching and the characteristic horizontal lenticels. Lyon's CNC-cut blocks allow tonal information to be translated from photographic source material into discrete plates, so the dense thicket of trunks reads at distance as an almost wallpaper-like rhythm and at close range as an accumulation of hand-pulled impressions on long-fibered kozo. Within his wider output, Aspen grove sits alongside other nature studies that test the figurative print methods he developed for the body against organic, vertical forms. The work belongs to the contemporary mokuhanga revival in which artists such as Lyon, Daniel Heyman, and Tom Killion adapt the Edo-period workshop tradition — baren, water-based pigment, hand-cut or machine-cut cherry — to subjects drawn from the American landscape rather than the meisho-e canon.