Rachel

Rachel is a portrait of a different sitter within Lyon's wider body of named-figure mokuhanga, joining the Sarah, Lisa, and Lily groups in his ongoing project of building a contemporary portrait gallery in the woodblock medium. The likeness is generated by photographing the model, separating the resulting image into multiple tonal plates, cutting each plate from a slab of cherry on a CNC router, and printing the blocks in sequence by hand on dampened [kozo](/glossary/kozo) [washi](/glossary/washi). The technique inherits the layered, registration-dependent logic of Edo-period [nishiki-e](/glossary/nishiki-e) — the multi-block color print developed in the 1760s — but substitutes a digital tonal separation for the traditional designer's hand-drawn key block. The portrait reads at viewing distance as a quiet, almost monochrome study and, on close inspection, reveals the discrete impressions that compose it. Rachel exemplifies how Lyon, working from his Kansas City studio, has used the figure to test mokuhanga's capacity to render skin, hair, and shadow at scales far beyond those of the historical workshop.