Jessica Reclining (rear)

Jessica Reclining (rear) shows the model in a horizontal recumbent pose viewed from behind, the back, hips, and legs forming the principal compositional mass across the sheet. The rear view aligns the print with a long Western tradition of the reclining nude — Velázquez, Ingres, Modigliani — translated into the materials and surface of mokuhanga. Lyon typically constructs such images from photographs converted to halftone or stochastic dot patterns, then carves the blocks on a CNC router so that the printed tone is built from thousands of small marks rather than the flat color fields of [nishiki-e](/glossary/nishiki-e). Printed by hand with [baren](/glossary/baren) on dampened [washi](/glossary/washi) using water-based pigments, the resulting impression has the soft optical mixing of historical mokuhanga while resolving into a photographic likeness at viewing distance. Within the Jessica series, the rear-reclining variant functions as a counterpart to the frontal reclining figure, completing a pair that maps the same body from opposing vantage points.