"Philly Morning" was inspired by morning walks down my street. One of my neighbors has a chain link fence that gets absolutely covered with gorgeous morning glories during the warm months, and walking by it always makes me smile!
Mokuhanga (meaning "wood print") is a traditional Japanese printmaking technique which uses water-based pigments instead of the oil-based inks that are often used in Western style printmaking. The difference between the way that the water-based ink bleeds into and becomes one with the paper and the way that oil-based inks sit on top of the surface can give a lighter, more etherial feel to a print that I have long admired from afar. I was finally able to spend four weeks working under a mokuhanga teacher in Japan in the Fall of 2025. Whereas my linocut prints rely on linework, my mokuhanga prints can fully embrace essences and shapes and colors. I am so excited to share the bounty of my newly learned skills with you!
"Morning Glory", an A5 sized print, was made by carving each of the image's core structures into 8 blocks of shina (a type of plywood), applying pigment to the blocks, then printing by hand using traditional bamboo leaf sheathed barens. This print has 12 impressions, because two of the blocks were used three times for each print.
Because each print is made by hand, there are going to be variations among each one. They are all truly one-of-a-kind!
