Description

This is a very special woodcut print because it was created by a master of the genre, Ansei Uchima. Uchima studied the traditional Japanese art of woodcut printing in Japan and carefully executed each print -- carving his own wood blocks and using custom made paper.  If you look carefully you can see the intricate layers of colors and shapes. This series was an homage to nature.  Can you spy the tree?

Details

• Ansei Uchima (American, 1921-2000)
• Forest Byobu "Fragrance" (1981)
• Woodblock print on Japanese paper
  
• Signed, titled and number 108/120 on bottom margin
  
• 38 1/2" x 26" (overall) 31" x 18 1/2" (sight)
• Newly matted under UV plexiglass
• Frame with wear to lower right corner

About the Artist 

Ansei Uchima was an esteemed woodblock print artist, painter, and fine arts professor, holding positions at both Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University. Born in California in 1921 to Japanese immigrants, he returned to his parents' homeland in 1939 to study architecture. Due to the outbreak of World War II, he remained in Japan throughout the 1950s where he studied Japanese printmaking and painting. His post-war association with art historian and civil servant Oliver Statler introduced Uchima to the sosaku-hanga (creative print) movement, which incorporated a Western modernist aesthetic. Like other artists in the sosaku-hanga school, Uchima carved, inked, and printed his own wood blocks, enjoying the accidents and unexpected opportunities that arose spontaneously from interaction with the wood block. His first prints, beginning in 1957, drew from nature and the world around him. After he returned to the United States in 1959, his floating, calligraphic compositions, characteristic of sosaku-hanga, suggested the growing influence of Abstract Expressionism. Uchima used Japanese paper made especially for him by a Japanese master papermaker Ichibei Iwano.

Recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for the Arts in 1962 and 1970, his work is included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art (among others).  He passed away in 2000 in New York City.