#MOKU HANGA BARENS PORTABLE#
#MOKU HANGA BARENS PLUS#

If we were to spend just five minutes watching ourselves speak we would know this. It’s a mystery that we rarely treat with the awe and respect it deserves.

#MOKU HANGA BARENS PLUS#

That, plus my decades as an illustrator, where my job was essentially to read a document and then make pictures to go with it, predisposes me to work with words and text. OPP: What role does text play in your work?ĪB: My major in college was English literature. Even though the method does come with a lot of cultural weight, I try to take the support of the beauty and elegance and history of the method without letting go of my own voice and my American concerns and identity. Not many 21st-century western artists could hope to achieve the degree of perfection attained by the great 17th- and 18th-century ukiyo-e masters, but unfortunately that type of work is what many people think of when you say 'Japanese woodblock.” I try to avoid this silent standard in people’s minds by calling what I do moku hanga or watercolor woodblock print-a term I especially like.

And after my long career as a commercial artist working with four-color offset print technology, the transparent color overlays inherent in woodblock printing make intuitive sense to me.īecause the Japanese brought this art form to unimaginable heights of perfection, working with moku hanga can be a difficult burden to bear. It’s also a beautiful method-wood, water, natural pigments, brushes, hand-held carving tools and handmade paper are the simple materials that make the method a pleasure to work with.

#MOKU HANGA BARENS PORTABLE#

I took up moku hanga because it’s an artistic medium that is neither toxic nor messy, and it’s compact and portable enough to do on the side in my small home-based studio while I continue to serve my freelance digital commercial illustration clients.

OPP: What keeps you returning to moku hanga? What do you love about the process?ĪB: Although I’m a great admirer of Japanese art and aesthetics, I didn’t start working with moku hanga because of an interest traditional Japanese art. Selections from Secret Codewords of the NSA, each 6' x 6.' Photo credit: Stephen Petegorsky Japanese woodblock prints, also called ukiyo-e, are known especially for their intense use of color. After a time colors began to be added by hand and then, as woodblock printing became the primary form of commercial printing in Japan, printers began to carve blocks for each color. Woodblock printing was brought to Japan in the 8th century by Buddhists from China and was first used to reproduce religious texts. Other Peoples Pixels: Can you explain moku hanga for the non-printmakers among us?Īnnie Bissett: Moku hanga, which means “wood print,” is a centuries-old Japanese way of printing that uses waterborne pigments, brushes instead of rollers, and a hand-held printing device called a baren instead of a mechanical press. Annie lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island. You can purchase Annie's four self-published books here. Annie's numerous solo exhibitions include: Playing with Fire (2018) at Oxbow Gallery (Northampton MA), Past/Present/Now (2016) at Charles Krause Reporting (Washington DC) and I Was a 20th Century Lesbian at Hosmer Gallery (Northampton MA.) Her work is in the permanent collections of notable institutions like New York Public Library, Boston Public Library, Portland Museum of Art, and Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. Working primarily in moku hanga, she has tackled religious relics and spiritual cliche, the historical struggle for gay liberation and the idiomatic expressions associated with wealth and poverty in capitalist America. Printmaker ANNIE BISSETT explores the visual symbols and verbal cliches associated with various belief systems: from the religious to the political to the economic to the prophetic.

Moku hanga barens