Maki Haku

Two unique qualities of Maki Haku prints are the textures achieved by working the designs in wet cement and the use of Kanji (Chinese characters) as design motifs. In 1962, he started adding texture to his prints. At first, he added texture to the entire sheet after it was printed. In 1965, he began embossing designs into unprinted paper by using a press to transfer a design created in cement on a carved plywood board, and then adding color with stencils. He distorted and rearranged the strokes of Chinese characters to produce striking and serene images. For example, Poem 71-91 is a highly stylized representation of the kanji 無, which is pronounced mu and means nothingness, an important concept in some forms of Buddhism. Maki developed his relief-carving process in the early 1960s: he would first carve a conventional wood block, then place a cement mixture around the raised areas he intended to build up, carving and chiselling it into the desired shape once it had set, before graining the entire surface of the finished block once the cement had fully dried. He rolled on his colours, which could include poster paints, oil colours and offset printing inks, over the raised areas of the block, using stencils to define the areas to be inked, and often applied a thin film of red or cobalt-blue oil paint, lightly diluted with turpentine, over his colours to give the finished print a deep, velvety appearance. The paper was placed on the inked block and first rolled by hand with a soft roller to adhere to the printing block, then passed through an etching press, where heavy pressure embossed the paper and printed the image. He would then take a second sheet of paper coated with diluted rice paste and glue it by hand onto the printed sheet with a hand roller, after which the two glued sheets were passed twice more through the etching press, laminating them and producing an even deeper embossing. He occasionally applied colour by hand to specific areas of a print, and, as a final step, added his artist's seal, which he considered part of the composition. From the mid-to-late 1960s he began printing on laminated torinoko and shin-torinoko paper, a thicker double sheet that made possible his signature cement-relief methodology, and introduced a cataloguing system that let collectors identify a print's year of production and its place within the numbered sequence of unique designs published that year. In Ushi, Maki sought to give a modern appearance to the cultural heritage of ideograms while preserving an Eastern sensibility, capturing the characteristically Japanese sense of the beauty of space, a feeling of reverence toward boundless space, while also exploiting the boundary offered by the beauty and life of the paper itself. Although Maki cannot strictly be called a calligrapher, he was rather a student of ancient ideograms and Chinese characters, from which he drew ideas for his prints while altering the characters to serve the overall design, the print demonstrates how he adapted older techniques to his own purposes, notably by expressing force through three distinct qualities of black: a traditional solid black in the vertical stroke, a medium-strength black in the lower horizontal stroke, and a finely mottled, semi-grey black in the upper curved stroke, their contrast constantly drawing the eye from one variation to another; this effect was reinforced by his use of three different wood-grain textures across the same three strokes. Maki took the kanji in their present-day form and used his imagination to recreate what he thought might have been their original pictogram; this is especially evident in his interpretations of the character for "woman" (女, Poem 5) and "wife" (妻, Poem 21), both infused with feminine grace and flexibility. From the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, Maki's prints focused exclusively on developing kanji-based imagery, building up a well-established visual library from which his earlier prints of this phase naturally served as inspiration for later works, producing some of his most compelling, successful and sought-after prints of the period. His working method changed in the 1970s because of severe pain in his arms, hands and shoulders that prevented him from carrying out his work fully, leading him to favour printing from carved wood blocks, a technique he had already used earlier in his career, over the more physically demanding process required by his cement-modelled or wood-carved relief blocks. Beginning in the 1970s and continuing into the 1980s, Maki also incorporated persimmons into his work, producing a series of pieces centred on the fruit that remain a distinctive and sought-after part of his catalogue. Into the late 1980s and 1990s Maki continued a ceramics theme, producing further series such as Hantō and Wan, made instead as collages; as his health declined, his work adopted this method, reducing his use of embossing and returning to wood blocks and screen-printing media in an effort to ease the physical cost of production while meeting growing demand for his work. Accordingly, in the last decade of his life he began increasing his edition sizes and repeating successful themes such as kanji designs, in an effort to allow as many people as possible the opportunity to acquire one of his iconic prints. Well aware of his declining health, Maki also began to allude metaphorically to his approaching end, both in the subject matter of his designs and through a series titled Z. Toward the end of his career he also produced prints of multicoloured goban (go boards), abstract works marked by geometric motifs, and a small number of prints depicting Mount Fuji; his last known prints were simple woodblocks of traditional sailboats.