A diary entry on mokuhanga woodblock prints, watercolor healing, and letting a stranger’s residency move you unexpectedly
Monday, A Small Gallery Show I Nearly Walked Past
Nearly skipped this particular exhibition, Rebirth and Healing, featuring watercolour paintings and traditional Japanese mokuhanga woodblock prints by Nancy Steele-Makasci, inspired directly by her own 2024 residency at MI-LAB in Echizen, Japan, assuming from the title alone it might lean toward the kind of vague, overly earnest wellness framing that sometimes undermines otherwise genuinely strong technical work, and I want to record how completely wrong that assumption turned out to be.
The mokuhanga technique itself, a traditional Japanese woodblock printing method requiring extraordinary patience and precision across multiple carved blocks and careful layered printing, produced work with a genuinely meditative quality that earned its healing framing honestly, technique and emotional content reinforcing each other rather than one simply riding on the other’s coattails.
Monday Afternoon, The Specific Piece That Actually Got Me
One print, built around layered blues suggesting water gradually reclaiming a damaged landscape, produced a genuinely unexpected emotional reaction I was not prepared for standing in a Tuesday afternoon gallery, the kind of small, quiet cry you try to disguise as simply needing to check your phone.
Tuesday, A Technical Curiosity Sparked By This Visit
I have started reading about mokuhanga’s specific carving and printing process since this visit, genuinely tempted to explore some version of layered printmaking myself, a technical departure from my usual portrait work I would not have considered before encountering this particular artist’s residency-inspired body of work.
A Small Exhibition Worth Seeking Out Deliberately
Whatever brings you through this gallery’s doors, this particular show rewards patience and close looking considerably more than its modest scale might initially suggest, and I am genuinely glad I did not let my own low expectations keep me from walking in.
I also learned, reading further into the artist’s own statement afterward, that a single mokuhanga print can require dozens of separate carved blocks and printing passes to complete, a labour-intensive process that makes the finished work’s apparent serenity feel considerably more hard-won once you understand what actually produced it.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/