Mokuhanga, or Japanese woodblock, is a traditional form of non-toxic relief printing that uses water-based inks. Catalan artist Sebi Subirós provided an introduction to this special, very skilful technique on a week-long course at Joan Miró’s printmaking workshops in Palma.
Although I’ve done linoprinting, I hadn’t yet tried my hand at any type of woodcut. We learnt about creating plywood plates using relatively simple traditional Japanese tools and materials, including how to do the image transfer of our original drawing.
Then, we went on to handprint them using natural pigments (preparing inks manually) and nori paste on Japanese papers; we were able to try out various samples so that we could see the different effects that could be achieved with each.
Many of the people on the course were working artists and came prepared with their own ideas. While we were all starting from the same point, it was a brilliant opportunity to learn from experienced individuals and how they created their own visions.
I decided to take inspiration from the immediate grounds around the workshops and chose the 18th-century Mallorcan possessió Son Boter. After creating an ink sketch, I then split the image into three colours and transferred these to separate plates to create a multi-block print (also a first for me!).
The whole experience was fascinating and a fairly steep learning curve, from transferring the images using nori paste and cutting into the plates using knives and chisels, to creating registration indents called kentos and manually inking up and printing the plates using a baren.
