This is the first experiment printing a netsuke wood block on dampened Hosho paper. I sketched the image from the photograph of the Man with a Fan from Ammy's netsuke photo album.
I first learnt about Hosho paper from illustrator and printmaker Peter Brown when I joined his Japanese woodblock printing course at Spike Island in March 2012. I was hooked but spent the next three years resisting the actual doing of it. Instead, I was thinking about it and spending time looking at Japanese woodblock prints, researching print makers and sourcing books on Japanese woodblock printing. I didn't know it would take another three years for me to start making my own woodblock prints.
I have been printing on off-white Somerset satin and Japon simile for test prints. I love the contrast of the watery blackness of the ink on the dampened white hosho paper.
"I was fumbling with colour prints," he continues, "until one day I saw a woodcut by Sumio Kawakami. It was black and white, a small work showing a woman walking in the wind, with a poem about the wind of early summer. Suddenly I knew I had found what I was looking for. Kawakami had shown me the way. I threw myself into prints." Shiko Munakata - On Woodblock Prints - Southbank Centre London 1991
