Recent Prints:

These prints are grouped more or less chronologically, the first being the most recently finished. I use for myself and in my teaching an image to describe and think of the development and production of a hanga woodblock print, I call it "the theater analogy". Concepts include ideas such as: "the blocks are the actors, the colors, their lines"; or, "as the artist and maker of the print you are like the producer and director, you establish the idea and the road map for the project, but the success of the things depends a great deal on your being flexible and listening to the actors and their interactions as things develop". People ask how long it takes to make a print. It is hard to answer this question, for the time designing and carving, the actual time printing a set of editioned prints, can be small compared to the time inolved in "rehearsals" (getting all the parts - the blocks and colors - to work together)!

A theater performance is not a static fixed thing, ever. Each performance is a little different. Similarly no two hanga prints in an edition are exactly the same, there are just too many steps involving head and hand for them to be identical. You'll notice print labeled "second" or "third" state. This refers to a significant re-working of the print that I imagine as a new production (perhaps the adition of a few new actors (blocks), the changing of colors, the re-fashioning or editing of significant parts of the image.