Prints as Portals

To make something is, while you are making that thing (and in the time you are thinking about making that thing) to become that thing. To make something is, to connect with process, to connect with materials, to connect with memories, to connect with others. Make a batch of cookies from scratch and you experience more cookie connection than if you go buy a bag of cookies. Home-made cookies are more “you”. Make a drawing by putting pen to paper, and you can become those marks on the page. If the marks depict a tree, you experience, in the making of that tree image, becoming that tree.

Perhaps because the work is so demanding, perhaps because the materials are so intimate (wood and water), the experience of becoming "that thing" is particularly likely in the process of making a woodblock print. To make a picture by carving a set of wood blocks, selecting colors and printing those blocks, and then by pressing printing papers to these blocks with a hand-held baren? To do all that work is to go deep into relationship with process, with materials, with shapes, with colors. Imagery achieved through this method is unlike imagery achieved with a smart phone camera and a digital printer. As with that batch of home-made cookies, for all its handwork and intimacy, there is more of the maker in the art.

Taylor McNeil and I built Prints as Portals to explore and enjoy woodblock prints that he and I have collected. The grouping represents some of our best prints, but also prints which we think are set up to transport, visually. Prints that function as portals.

Know a few things about these prints:

The prints of this exhibit were made by collaborative teams from 3 time periods:

• Edo Japan of a bit under 200 years ago,
• Taisho era Japan of a little under 100 years ago,
• Lyme, NH of a little under two months ago.

Each of these prints involved publishers, artists, carvers, and printers working together to “become the woodblock print”. All of the prints we printed by hand using hand-held baren instead of a press. All of the prints invite travel, offering escapes to a woodblock world, a world of carved shapes and soft, water-borne colors.

The star of the exhibit is Hiroshi Yoshida's Sacred Garden of the Meiji Shrine. Included in the print image, floating in the clear atmosphere above Yoshida's beautiful trees and his “off into the distance beautiful blue-green landscape" is a poem composed by Japans' Meiji Emperor, Mutsuhito (in honor of whom, along with the Empress Shioken, the Meiji Shrine was built):

Japan, which has continued endlessly and without disorder since ancient times,

is a land created by the gods.

The creation of the Meiji Shrine (and its surrounding Meiji Jingu park) was a national project from 1916 - 1920. 100,000 trees were brought from all over Japan to initiate its life as an urban forest sanctuary in downtown Tokyo. Many thousands volunteered to work on the grounds and buildings. This print, an impression that Hiroshi Yoshida kept for himself*, is likely an early proof of an edition used in the fund-raising effort for the building project. Note the bird's eye perspective of the image. It functions as a portal into the sacred Shinto shrine and into an appealing depiction of a balanced relationship of buildings and forest, of national identity and wonderfully portrayed trees. It also likely functioned as a portal for Hiroshi Yoshida personally. This was his first print project (at age 40), and it quite likely may be a big part of what inspired into hime to devote the rest of his artistic career to making color woodblock prints.

In other prints of the exhibit find devices, keys, and clues which aid our travel and transport. Door openings and windows, aerial “bird’s eye” perspectives, bridges, roads, stairs and pathways leading into temples, juxtapositions encouraging us to “go there”. In the older prints of Kunisada and the Hiroshige find inset cartouches describing depicted imagery, inserted text sharing actor’s roles and short narratives. Artist’s signature and publisher marks, censor seals, marks of the carvers and printers, there is much that tells the story of the making of these images. In the newer shin hanga prints portrayed landscapes encourage travel through the nature of their depictions; references to spatial and light relationships suggest moments alongside riverbanks and lakes, or apprehensions of sacred spaces that seem entreating and accessible.

All invitations for us to “travel there".

We hope you enjoy the trip!

Matt and Taylor, 3.6.2026

*this print impression was held, unmounted and out of the light, for over 100 hundred years in the collection of the Yoshida family.