Lisa

Lisa is part of Lyon's sustained portrait series in mokuhanga, in which named sitters — Sarah, Rachel, Lily, Lisa — are translated from photographic studies into hand-printed woodblocks. The artist resolves each likeness into a stack of tonal plates, cuts the plates from cherry plywood on a CNC router, and pulls them sequentially in registration on sheets of kozo [washi](/glossary/washi) using water-based pigment and a [baren](/glossary/baren). Where [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries codified the beautiful figure into stylized line and pattern, Lyon's portraits push the medium toward continuous tone, allowing facial structure and expression to carry the work rather than costume or setting. The Lisa print, like its companions, is typically produced at a scale far larger than the historical [oban](/glossary/oban) format, foregrounding the labor of the multi-block process. Within Lyon's career — beginning with his apprenticeship under Hiroki Morinoue in the late 1990s — this group of portraits represents the central engine of his output and one of the most ambitious uses of post-digital mokuhanga by any contemporary practitioner.