Skip to main content

Watch the Making of Japanese Woodblock Prints, from Start to Finish, by a Longtime Tokyo Printmaker

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8ma5q9-lA0

There are a few names anyone interested in Japanese woodblock printing today can’t help but hear sooner or later: Utagawa Hiroshige, Katsushika Hokusai, Kitagawa Utamaro, David Bull. That last, you may have guessed, is not the name of an 18th-century Japanese man. In fact, David Bull still walks among us today, especially if we happen to live in the old Asakusa section of Tokyo, where he keeps his woodblock-print studio Mokuhankan.

Born in England and raised in Canada, Bull discovered the world of ukiyo-e, those Japanese “pictures of the floating world,” in his late twenties. Just a few years after first trying his hand, without formal training, at making his own prints, he moved to the Japanese capital to dedicate himself to the form. Today, on his personal site and Youtube channel, he offers a wealth of English-language resources on the art and craft of the Japanese woodblock print.

In the video up top, he provides expert commentary on the making of one particular print by a young Mokuhankan printer named Natsuki Suga. The work is broken into ten stages, beginning with the application of the basic orange background color, moving on through the addition of sky blues and tea-field greens (not to mention shadows, shadows, and “more shadows”), all the way through to the final embossing of the title and artist’s name. The result, revealed at the end in a stage-by-stage time lapse, is a vivid and idyllic scene aesthetically balanced between ukiyo-e tradition and the present-day art styles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nCbsbaVbVM

In the video just above, you can see Bull himself provide commentary as he makes a woodblock print of his own — in real time, from start to finish, with no cuts. Originally shot as a live Twitch stream, it shows Bull’s entire process from blank block to completed print, which takes nearly three and a half hours. That may actually seem like a surprisingly short time in which to create a work of art, but then, Bull has been at this for nearly 40 years.

Bull’s experience also comes through in his ability to explain his techniques and tell stories about the Japanese woodblock’s artistic development as well as his own. What may seem like a video of interest only to ukiyo-e specialists has in fact racked up, as of this writing, more than 1.2 million views on Youtube alone. But then, it isn’t entirely unknown for a soft-spoken artist dedicated to a highly specific form to win a wide audience with his educational productions. “I’m completely certain that Bob Ross hasn’t died,” as one commenter puts it. “He just got a new haircut.”

Related Content:

Enter a Digital Archive of 213,000+ Beautiful Japanese Woodblock Prints

Download 2,500 Beautiful Woodblock Prints and Drawings by Japanese Masters (1600-1915)

Download Hundreds of 19th-Century Japanese Woodblock Prints by Masters of the Tradition

See Classic Japanese Woodblocks Brought Surreally to Life as Animated GIFs

Watch an Art Conservator Bring Classic Paintings Back to Life in Intriguingly Narrated Videos

Watch Every Episode of Bob Ross’ The Joy Of Painting Free Online: 403 Episodes Spanning 31 Seasons

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

Watch the Making of Japanese Woodblock Prints, from Start to Finish, by a Longtime Tokyo Printmaker is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/3khrH4y
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

Howard Zinn’s Recommended Reading List for Activists Who Want to Change the World

Image by via Wikimedia Commons Back in college, I spotted A People’s History of the United States   in the bags and on the bookshelves of many a fellow undergraduate. By that time, Howard Zinn’s alternative telling of the American story had been popular reading material for a couple of decades, just as it presumably remains a couple more decades on. Even now, a dozen years after Zinn’s death, his ideas about how to approach U.S. history through non-standard points of view remain widely influential. Just last month, Radical Reads featured the reading list he originally drew up for the  Socialist Worker , pitched at “activists interested in making their own history.” Zinn’s recommendations naturally include the work of other historians, from Gary Nash’s Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early America (“a pioneering work of ‘multiculturalism’ dealing with racial interactions in the colonial period”) to Vincent Harding’s There Is a River: The Black Struggle for ...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more