New Moon (From Yoshitoshi Series)

This 2011 print draws explicitly on the work of Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, the late nineteenth-century artist whose series '100 Aspects of the Moon' paired lunar imagery with figures from myth, history, and literature in dramatically composed, psychologically intense prints. Moilanen's engagement with Yoshitoshi is an act of direct artistic lineage: she acknowledges one of the last major masters of Meiji-period woodblock printing as a source while reinterpreting his imagery through her own mokuhanga practice. A 'new moon' — essentially a dark sky — inverts Yoshitoshi's typical treatment of a luminous crescent or full disk as compositional anchor, suggesting a figure defined by absence of light rather than its presence. The mokuhanga technique's capacity for deep, graduated darks through layered pigment application suits a nocturnal subject where tone carries meaning rather than line, and Moilanen's mythological and figural subjects are rendered in the characteristic soft-edged, luminous darkness of water-based printing.