Designer: Charles Bartlett | Carver: Taran Casey | Printer: Ayumi Ohashi

Paper size: 24cm by 36cm | Enlargement | Shipping Code: [L] ? | Currency: $ / £ / €

Price: $ 270.00£ 199.00€ 235.00 [Reprinting]   [Notify me when it comes back]

Description: The print you see here was published in 1916 by Shozaburo Watanabe, based on a design by Charles Bartlett, an Englishman who was in Japan at the time, as part of what was planned to be a trip around the world (he never made it back to England).

It is not clear which of the two men instigated the project, but it was certainly a productive collaboration, resulting ultimately in a couple of dozen pioneering woodblock prints, basically inventing the shin-hanga genre between the two of them (although to be a bit more encompassing, we should acknowledge that Watanabe was also working with the Austrian Friedrich Capelari at this same time).

Although clearly rooted in the techniques of the old ukiyo-e, with the image first being drawn in ink, and cut as a 'key' block, with colour blocks then filling in the outlines, these designs have features that must have left the printing crews of the time in shock. The printers had trained all their lives to be able to print wide areas of perfectly smooth solid colour, but were now being asked to leave mottled and 'spotty' impressions. And while the old prints used gradations in a few set 'classical' ways (top of sky, edge of water, etc.) these new prints called for gradated colour in every corner of the image.

A typical ukiyo-e print was designed to be effective with as few impressions of colour as possible - a matter of pure economics - but these new prints called for many dozens of impressions, and as the genre grew and developed, so did the block counts. These prints were expensive - no more 'bowl of noodles' - and were clearly aimed at the rich customers of the foreign market, Japan at the time being very much a developing country, with a very poor labour force.

Watanabe's experiments were hugely successful, and the genre flourished, with the roster of designers soon encompassing Japanese names as well: Hiroshi Yoshida, Tsuchiya Koitsu, and Kawase Hasui.

We here at Mokuhankan would like to help widen knowledge of these early days of shin-hanga, so it was an obvious choice to ask our young 'team' of Taran Casey (carver) and Ayumi Ohashi (printer) to have a go at this one, and here we are.

Taran-san took quite a lot of video footage during work on this print, and has uploaded a 'start to finish' video of the project, to his YouTube channel:

Making of this 'Kamakura' print.