#Moku hanga barens registration

So I was happy a couple of times recently to leave prints and printmaking behind and head outside. Seems to require a lot of time in the studio. Nashville Warbler on Bean Trellis in Winter. Only time will tell how I come into my own interpretation of moku hanga.

So crude as my lines might be I plan to continue to use them in my prints. But it's not for me, at least not at the moment.

I know of some art in this manner that I greatly like. From what I can see many skip the part based on graceful, sinuous lines and instead are more interested in rich color fields. There seem to be quite a few contemporary Western printmakers using moku hanga today, each in their own way. And it also shows the difficulty of doing it today. This helps to explain some of the accomplishments of this type of print.

In ukiyo-e prints this was no problem because the artist and the carver were two different people! And the printer was a third person involved in the process. For me there at two huge obstacles to doing this myself: first I can't do graceful, sinuous brush paintings, and to do so would probably take years of practice and second, I'll never become such an accomplished carver of wood as to translate sinuous lines from paint to carved wood. At least I hope so! Time will tell.Īnother thing I love in many ukiyo-e prints is the sinuous, graceful line, based most often on the sinuous, graceful line of the original brush paintings on which the prints were based. That said I've seen some moku hanga prints that are extremely rich in color and that is something that I think is desirable enough to more than compensate for the technical problems involved. It's a necessity, not a virtue, not something I seek out. Still I don't like having to worry about technique. And given all the work involved, at least when I make a print, it seems silly to not have more to show for it than just one print. more than one more or less consistent print of the same image. But after my 5+ years of printmaking I realize that technique is an integral part of it, at least if you want to make an edition, i.e. Printmakers seemed SO interested in technique! At the time that was the last thing that I thought art should be about. The more I've done it the more I remember why I shied away from it in college. I began printmaking about 5-6 years ago I think, though I had had a brief introduction in college. These two prints also show at least one of the problems with this type of printmaking: the background color, in particular, varies greatly between prints. Now I have! It can be seen in the two prints above and below of a Nashville Warbler on a Bamboo Bean Trellis in Winter, which we had in our backyard on and off over a two week period a number of winters ago. Though I'd read the last statement before, the fact that the color merges with the paper, you actually need to see it to understand it.

#Moku hanga barens registration

It is more related to things like the use of non-toxic materials(since the ink is water-based not petroleum based), the fact that it can be done without a printing press, though this has been true of all my other prints as well, that it has a registration system that most likely is better than the one I've used in the past, and perhaps most of all it is capable of a rich color, a color that actually is absorbed into the paper, rather than lying on top of it. That is no longer the case but it was my first reaction to them. Though I've always liked those prints I suspect I first liked them more for their influence on the art of people like Edgar Degas than for any other reason. Most people will probably be familiar with it through ukiyo-e prints, such as those by Utamaro, Hokusai, Hiroshige et al. As best I can tell the term itself just refers to Japanese woodblock or woodblock printmaking.

I've debated trying Moku Hanga printmaking.