
Great Point lighthouse
- Medium:
- Mokuhanga (Japanese woodblock)
- Image courtesy of
- Saru Gallery
Description
A view of Great Point Lighthouse, the squat white tower at the northern tip of Nantucket Island in Massachusetts. The subject sits well outside the conventional repertoire of mokuhanga, and the print is characteristic of Kristensen's transcultural practice: a Danish-born artist resident in Japan applying [baren](/glossary/baren)-printed water-based pigments to an American Atlantic landmark. The composition is likely organized around the vertical of the tower against a horizontal band of sea and a wide sky, the kind of structural simplicity that suits the registration of multiple woodblocks. [Bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradation across the sky and surf lends the print the atmospheric softness associated with Hasui's coastal scenes, while the chosen subject — a working New England navigation aid rather than a Japanese fishing village — situates Kristensen within a contemporary generation of mokuhanga artists who treat the medium as a portable technique rather than an exclusively Japanese genre. It complements his other non-Japanese landscape prints as a study in how the woodblock idiom translates across geography.



