![]() So my mokuhanga lineage seems to stop at Clifton Karhu. More often cited as a mentor to Karhu is Stanton Macdonald-Wright, a California painter who ended up in Japan in the 1960s and taught Karhu color theory. Pointed out to Karhu how well the bold lines and colors in his paintings would do as The only reference I can find about Karhu studying with any particular printmakers in Japan is in the LA Times article, which notes that gallery owner Tetsuo Yamada first Not the most glowing reviews, but Karhu was very successful and sold a lot of prints. Good to look at when one is tired, but they do not stimulate us to look That's the sort of pictures they make." Hisae Fujii, curator of printsĪt Tokyo's National Gallery of Modern Art, agrees: "Karhu's pictures are Tetsuya Noda, a prize-winning print artist who combines photographic "Karhu's technique is excellent, but it is essentially decorative," says An excellent and lengthy 1986 article from the Los Angeles Times quotes a number of Japanese artists critiquing Karhu's work: As is often true of westerners who learn mokuhanga, Karhu chose to depict idealized Japanese subject matter in his work. He was known for the fact that he always wore traditional Japanese attire as well as for his woodblock prints, and the legend is that the Japanese said Karhu was more Japanese than the Japanese. Karhu seems to have been quite a character. The Ren Brown Collection web site has a wide range of Karhu's prints if you'd like to see some. He grew disillusioned with being a missionary in Japan (who wouldn't?) and relocated to Kyoto in the early 1960s, where he painted and then learned to make woodblock prints. Karhu was stationed in Japan after WWII, left, was ordained as a Lutheran minister in 1955, then returned to Japan as a missionary and Bible salesman. So what about Clifton Karhu? The most thorough biography I can find is at the Verne Gallery web site. (Joseph Vorgity and I are some kind of mokuhanga siblings, since we both studied with Matt Brown.) Since Bill Paden taught in New York, many current practitioners studied with him, including April Vollmer and Joseph Vorgity. ![]() In Japan he met Clifton Karhu, another American from the midwest (Minnesota), who taught Paden mokuhanga. Bill Paden was born in Indiana in 1930 and lived in Japan from 1960-65. Realizing that I might be able to trace my own mokuhanga lineage further, I got to wondering about Bill Paden and how he learned the craft, so I turned to Google. He wanted to be sure we all did things the right He was a very generous personality and loved to share He lived in New York City for many years and taught at NYU. He was a hanga woodblock printmaker from way back, having studied moku-hanga in Japan during the Sixties. Matt cites David Bull, who is a mostly self-taught English-born Canadian living in Japan, and an artist named Bill Paden as people from whom he learned a great deal. ![]() He started making woodblock prints in the early 1990s and learned mostly through books, like Walter Phillips' Technique of the Color Woodcut. The rest I learned on my own and with some help from the online Baren Forum, started in the 90s by David Bull. I call Matt my teacher, and will continue to do so, but the truth is it was a three-day workshop and that was the extent of my formal training. ![]() I learned mokuhanga from Matt Brown, a New Englander like myself, at a workshop here in Massachusetts. Perhaps because mokuhanga was transmitted through a system of apprenticeship for most of its history, the role of the teacher/master is very important and students consider themselves to be lifelong students of their particular teacher no matter how adept they become. For example, the form of meditation that I practice, which began in India, proudly traces a multi-generation lineage of teachers. Lineage seems to be an especially strong concept in the east. While reading April Vollmer's new book about mokuhanga, I noticed that when talking about an artist she would often mention that artist's lineage: where and with whom they studied.
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