Romanza and Color Harmony:
Woodblock Printing by Keiji Shinohara
This exhibition presents a series of printed impressions and complementary woodblock carvings all preparatory to a single artwork, a woodblock print entitled Romanza by Keiji Shinohara. The blocks and prints were commissioned from the artist by the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts following Keiji Shinohara’s Art Now exhibition presented at the Museum in 2001-2002. The intent of the Museum and the artist was to create a series of works that would visually document the distinctive process of Japanese woodblock printing.
Shinohara is a skilled practitioner of ukiyo-e æ a centuries-old tradition and process in Japanese printmaking. The artist creates a design and then proceeds to carve in wood panels a relief section for each different color or pattern in the composition. Following a precise sequence, the relief area of each woodblock is carefully inked and printed on prepared sheets of paper. With considerable skill and dexterity a printmaker can achieve amazing effects such as mottled color and gradation of tone in an individual area through a single inking of the block. In traditional ukiyo-e, three individuals carry out the process: the artist, the carver, and the printer. Shinohara, however, performs all of these steps himself.
This didactic display is organized in the order in which the design was printed. Thus, each succeeding sheet of paper has one more printed layer, or impression, than the sheet of paper that precedes it. The woodblocks, however, which were not carved in the same sequence in which they were printed, are not always displayed alongside their companion printed image. Each woodblock is numbered on the front (recto) and the back (verso). Each printed sheet of paper includes text by the artist indicating the number of the woodblock used to print that impression.
Keiji Shinohara was born in Japan in 1955 and immigrated to the United States in 1985. He lives in Middletown, Connecticut where he teaches at Wesleyan University.
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