Featured Anyone Read Japanese? Help with limited edition pencil signed woodblock? print

I found this last week & just found time to photograph it. It is larger than most woodblock prints (if that is what it is) & pencil signed/numbered. But the signature and the title are in japanese!
Does anyone recognise the artist's name? It looks like Kami to me?
Thanks for any help

 

I love it.
It is not a woodblock print. Silk screen print? Are you sure it is Japanese?

 

Not sure but title & signature are in japanese, right?

 

Sorry but have to disagree, it is a woodblock print, it is not possible to achieve tonal gradation with silkscreen, however one of the primary advantages and characteristics of woodblock printing is the variation of tonality as you can selectively wipe the ink away on the printing block; look at the "shading" in the print - this can only be achieved using woodblock printing. (or photographic reproductions of woodblock prints )

 

it's japanese,i can't decipher all of them,but the second word is 江 or Ko / E in japanese it means river,the third word is タ or ta,so i think maybe "kami" is the artist name and the japanese words that wrote there is to explain the name of the river or something about the river this is just my amateur search,cmiiw

 

The edges look like a metal plate rather than wood block, but I can't see it well enough to be sure. The colors have some small losses on the left that would seem to indicate metal.

@moreotherstuff

 

"it is not possible to achieve tonal gradation with silkscreen"

do you mean where a background color shifts from light to dark in the same field ..?

 

Ok I stand corrected!

In the native examples shown above, pigments were applied to the screen which bled into one another when squeegeed onto the paper. So in effect, a simple type of shading is definitely achieved - but IMHO without the subtlety of the wood-block print technique.

The OP's print is a fine example of woodblock printing. It would extremely difficult if not impossible to have been printed by silkscreen, as silkscreen pigments are almost always opaque and woodblock printing inks have varying degrees of transparency, allowing the colour to fade away to nothing.

 

The subject matter looks like southern China, but the technique looks like Japanese woodblock. The artist's name looks like it might be "Yokami", which would be Japanese. You might try getting a full view, straight on, and crop it to just the image area (removing the frame) and try a reverse image search on google and on ukiyo-e.org .

 

This is an old thread - 2018. I remember thinking at the time that there was no cause, from the photos provided, to question the technique.

Is there a plate impression? A good, crisp close-up of a corner might answer that. A look at the back of the print might tell the tale. Such woodblocks as I have seen have been printed on thin paper, e.g. rice paper, and show ink bleed-through (talking about prints on paper, of course).

For all I know, it could be some continuous color process, some type of photo-litho of a painting. That's a common enough practice.

 

Thanks @moreotherstuff

 

IMHO extremely unlikely, but there again, just my 2 cents.

 

If Japanese, mulberry paper is more likely. That is what the old Ukiyo-e artists used.

 

@journeymagazine , what was your final disposition of this piece?

 

the 4 chinese characters are 灕江夕景。

灕江 is a famous river in south china city Guilin.
夕 sunset
景 scenery

https://zh-yue.wikipedia.org/wiki/灕江

 

Thanks, @Dundun

 

i need to learn my chinese better next time,

 

I hope @journeymagazine will drop by and tell us what happened with this print. It's lovely.

 

Hi all - I think j sold it on eBay