Uncle John’s Band

I love Japanese woodblock prints, and especially those of Kawase Hasui. Here are some of my favorites. You can see more here.

What fascinates me about them, other than their beauty, is that the artist is constrained by the number of woodblocks and the number of inks. But yet these simplified images seem more real than photographs. So one of their uses for me is to contemplate methods for reducing complex ideas to usable concepts while maintaining as much of the original richness as possible.