Tag: ukiyo-e

A Work of Art

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Some months back, someone on Reddit posted about an amazing vintage poster they’d found at a thrift shop of a woman in a traditional woodblock-print style holding a fan made of colour swatches. The only info on it was the name of a printing company, and she was dubbed the Pantone Geisha. And of course, as someone with a graphic design background and a borderline-unhealthy special interest in Japanese art, I fell completely in love.

I spent eons trying to track down the poster,  or find some sort of accreditation other than the facility where it was printed, so I could buy a copy but to no avail.

So I gave in, decided to use that damn graphic design background, and make my own take on her and her delightful palette fan. With the support and encouragement of my friends, I worked on pushing the “arts” aspect even further by turning her mimikaki kanzashi into paintbrushes, making her kimono have a blueprint inspiration, and possibly the easiest to miss but my favourite detail, turning a fibonacci circle into another hair ornament. A bit of a watercolour splash in the background, and the portrait was done!

Since this is inspired by extant, unaccredited art, I don’t feel comfortable selling prints, but if you would like to print a copy of your own, you can get a high-resolution copy right here. And if you do, you can always consider supporting me in other ways, if you’d like.

Art Gallery – Vintage Woodblock Prints

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A few years ago on my birthday, I went to dinner with my folks and some family friends. I had a wonderful time, the food was delicious, and I got some lovely gifts.

Leslie is the daughter of my father’s godmother. Bear with me, I know this is starting to sound like the beginning of an urban legend, but it is well and truly relevant. My grandmother and I share a birthday, and I believe inherited a lot of my fascination with the Japanese aesthetic from her. Her apartment was so tastefully furnished and had a lot of beautiful Japanese antiques and art pieces. I think they had a profound impact on me when I was a young girl, more so than I realized until recently. Kay, Leslie’s mother, was my grandmother’s dear friend when they were young, and was my father’s godmother. Leslie is family, even though not related by blood.

 

Kay purchased these beautiful woodblock prints while travelling in Japan with my grandmother many years ago. As far as I can tell, they were carefully lifted from a hand-bound book, each one has holes along one end of the page. The labels on the backs of the frames credit them to Utagawa Kunisada and date them to the mid-1800s. I have been unable to find other copies of these two prints anywhere on the internet so I can’t back the veracity of the claims, but they seem reasonable.

Imagine my shock when Leslie passed these on to me for my birthday, knowing how touched I would be, and how much I would appreciate them. All the gifts I got were incredibly thoughtful and I appreciated them all, but I was well and truly flabbergasted by these two simple but beautiful prints, due to the way they tied so many facets of the relationship between Leslie, her mother, my grandmother, and myself together so beautifully.