wood block printing

Artist Spotligtht…57th CWAJ Print Show

So once again it is that time of year. Starting on Friday, October 19th and running through the weekend, the College Women’s Association of Japan‘s annual exhibition and sale of modern Japanese hanga is on at the Tokyo American Club. Admission is free and open to everyone. Tokyo American Club members can also attend a pre-sale on Thursday night from 8-9 pm. Whether you go every year or this is your first time, I recommend that you do not miss this show. It is a chance to view and purchase top quality original art, whether you are looking for a souvenir of time in Japan, are a serious art collector or are simply tired of looking at your bare white walls. If you are not familiar with the history of Japanese printmaking I recommend that you read my Hanga 101 primer for history and context.

Featuring 201 prints by 200 artists, including the foremost printmakers in the field as well as 42 debut artists, the show gives viewers a real taste of the breadth of print work being created today. The prints span the full range of different printmaking techniques, from traditional woodblock to intaglio to silkscreen, as well as variety of subject matter. This year a newcomer to the show graces the cover, which is a rare event and it inspired me to highlight prints by artists appearing for the first time this year. Some are young, recent graduates of Japanese art programs, while many others have been working in their medium for sometime and have only recently applied and/or been admitted to the show, which is the case for YOSHIDA Hideshi and his dramatic cover print, The Strength to Destroy This Restraint. Reading like a mini sci-fi story, Yoshida has been conceptualizing this image since his 1993 reading of a story about an angel trapped in a hypercubic prison in The Fourth Dimension: Toward a Geometry of Higher Reality. The angel, turned into a sort of super hero/power ranger, escapes, symbolic of Yoshida’s emergence from an artistic slump. Having the prestige of the cover image would confirm that.

IWAKIRI Yuko describes her woodcut The Quartette very melodically: “As I was drawing the rows of trees of a virgin forest, I came to see a five-line staff score and it seemed to me like the cold autumnal wind which blew through it was playing a harmony…From oppressing low-pitched bass to sharp high-pitched notes that gradually vanish, and the sound of a bow scraping against the strings to a dry pizzicato – I described a field of the weaving sounds of the four string instruments.” Iwakiri uses 15-16 layers of water-based ink to produce a soft toned but dense image. She compares it to “drawing and painting with plates rather than just pulling out prints.”

TOHIGUCHI Toru’s silkscreen entitled Jaguchi is a bit of a mystery to the English language viewer. What do you see? I saw a face, until I translated the title, which means faucet in Japanese. A witty take on the art of the everyday, don’t you think?

Born in 1932, INOUE Katsue may be the oldest and most famous of this year’s printmakers to have a debut at the CWAJ Print Show this year. Her deceptively simple black and white woodcuts depicting flowing grasses and blowing flowers are both intensely graphic through their contrast of negative and positive space and atmospheric in a Georgia O’Keeffe way. Personally, I like her Flower in Wind poppy print because it would look good hung anywhere, with anything else, while keeping its own integrity. Practicality shouldn’t really figure in to art purchases, but sometimes its hard not to consider it. I think this one makes a lovely gift too.

A really sweet print is SOMEYA Mayumi’s Greeting Summer Solstice and her description of her working process corresponds with her imagery. “Block print is sometimes called blind work: You can’t visualize the result of your work until you see the final print. I always throb with excitement when I carefully turn over the final copy. You see, the paper comes out from under the plate which itself comes out through the press machine — all mysteriously and nonintuitively removed from the appearance of the final product. Whenever the result exceeded my expectations, I felt like joining hands with someone, anyone, and setting off on a journey somewhere far away. Now, that’s celebration! I work alone, yet I often feel as if I were collaborating with others, and then my atelier feels lively.”

The bargain print of the show is KAMATA Yuki’s small world lithograph with its subtle coloration and abstract photographic quality.

Numerous artists have layered in political and environmental thought to their works this year in response to the Great Japan Earthquake and the subsequent nuclear crisis. Amongst them are TAGO Hiroshi’s Murmuring Planet, a mezzotint on gampi paper with a drowning Earth in an upside down glass…

…and JUNG Il’s The Property of the Earth, a classic woodcut which looks almost computer pixellated yet has a very thick painting like texture. The whimsical nature of the print enforces his message that we need to cohabit our wonderful planet in harmony.

The souvenir print for those living in Asia has to be ARAI Keiko’s Temple of Daybreak as it has scenes of Angkor Wat and India all tied up in a glowing morning scene.

And for sheer decorative power take a look at lithographs from UENO Tomoko Time Plant…

…and SAKAI Junji Lluna de febrer ’12-I. Both are very painterly – Ueno’s has such a sense of brush stroke and Sakai is masterly at color block work.

And again this year, the Young Printmaker Award winner is an absolute stunner! TAKEUCHI Hidemi’s Harvest Day quadtych touches on themes of time and life, representing “the day of fruition, the day of accomplishment honoring time well spent.” It certainly looks like a successful harvest – in more ways than one!

All of these new CWAJ Print Show participants join a historic event that has taken placed uninterrupted since its inception in 1956. CWAJ volunteer members have worked tirelessly through the decades to produce one of the most prestigious hanga shows, using the proceeds to fund their respected scholarship program.

And as an additional incentive to get you out to the show, a few little birdies have told me there is a special surprise this year – an opportunity not to be missed – so I am looking forward to seeing you there! I’ll be working as a docent most of Friday and intermittently through the weekend. Please stop by and say hello.

Oct 15, 2012 By tokyojinja in Artist Spotlight 6 Comments Tags: CWAJ Print Show, Japanese art, japanese prints, wood block printing, wood block prints

Renovation Report and a DIY…Using Indian Wood Blocks to Create “Wallpaper” in the Master Bath

So this is the lovely Madame de Montreuil wallpaper from Les Indiennes that I wanted for the master bathroom. No real reason not to get it, other than its high price and its durability in a small bathroom with poor ventilation, but I also liked the idea of a challenge in creating something similar on my own.

So those of you who have been following for a while know that in Singapore in March of 2011 I purchased these traditional floral Indian wood blocks designed to print fabric with the intent of making my own “wallpaper” in the bathroom. Like any project, there is always some other work that needs to come first and I had been waiting on the installation of the pocket door in this earlier post.

So with that finally done and the sheetrock repaired and painted in BM White Dove as the base background, I bought paint and poster paper, set up a workspace and got to work practicing my block printing technique. Wow, it was so much more difficult than I had imagined and my first attempts were just awful! I had too much paint in the tray and trouble figuring out how much blotting I needed to do before stamping. I was looking forward to an irregular organic look, but not this organic!

I wanted to try out different patterns so I did a dense one, which was waaaay too busy, but more importantly, made me realize that as this isn’t wallpaper, I don’t have a partial block print option and need to leave space between each row so it can finish cleanly around wall edges and the ceiling.

Aha! Now this was starting to look right. And I liked the idea of a band of the small flowers above the tile and bisecting the wall behind the toilet. We even considered a square border of the little flowers all around on each wall – a fillet à la the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire – but discarded it as the room is just too tiny. I did this just casually eyeballing it, so luckily my sweet and very mathematically smart husband decided to help by figuring out the exact spacing and placement for the walls.

Hours of work went into these documents and the success of the project really hinges on his work more than mine.

While the design had started to come together, the quality of the actual prints was not so good. Here’s a close-up of one of the practice flowers – you can see the paint is very thick and three-dimensional.

Then late that night it finally occurred to me to actually research how this should be done and lo and behold, I discovered I was missing one essential piece, a small rubber roller called a brayer. So day two and off to the craft store we went! The brayer solves the gunky paint issue by controlling how much goes on and keeping it on the design part of the block only and out of the deep recesses. You can see from the practice below how much better the printing looks.

We took turns and painted the bathroom all in one evening. Sweet husband would work with a T-square and level and make tiny pencil registration marks (which were so small I couldn’t photograph them) on one wall and then I would paint there. Then we would switch off for the next wall. I didn’t realize how physically exhausting this would be, but it was like an extreme workout with a few hundred lunges and squats – squat and roll the paint, climb the stepstool, push with my arms raised, climb back down, squat again. Days later and I am still extremely sore.

Here is a little video – totally unrehearsed and you can hear how tired I am as I am almost slurring my words – but in the heat of working we forgot to take any more footage. Painting on the wall was very different from painting on the poster board as the wall was much harder and absorbed less paint and I needed to really work it on by pressing, rocking and banging. I even got adept at making repairs by adding paint to the block only in the spots that hadn’t printed well.

As I said before, having the design perfectly planned and marked on the wall made this project much easier than it would have been and guaranteed a great result.

We even went so far as to plan out the exact location and dimensions of the towel bar and did not print there, leaving the space perfectly clear.

How pretty and perfect is this Florence glass towel bar from Pottery Barn? The shape of the escutcheon mimics the shape of the flowers. More on all the accessory details in the final reveal post!

I am holding back on photos for one final post showing the whole bathroom, so just keep in mind that none of these photos do justice to the room or how fabulous the painting came out. It is softer and prettier than any actual wallpaper would have been!

Master Bathroom Related Posts:
Renovation Report…Do You Throw Good Money After Bad? Thoughts on Fixing My Master Bathroom
A Day Too Late…One Perfect Bathroom Photo
Renovation Report…Pocket Door Progress
Renovation Report…Vanity Dreams or Vanity Reality?