Yowsaku Sekino spent three years as a chemist before going to work as his father's printer, and years more printing other artists' lithographs, etchings and drypoints in his own Tokyo workshop, before he began making work under his own name in his forties.
What he is chasing is his father's copperplate line — the fineness of an etching, cut in wood. There is no key block: unlike traditional woodblock, no outline plate holds the image together. He never mixes inks, either. He layers them, printing one color over another until a third appears between them, the same color pulled three times to build body — seven separate blocks might go into the blues of a single vase, and out of that come dozens of shades.
It is why the prints read like painting rather than print: the color has depth in it, built up rather than laid down. A single print can take 21 impressions from 14 blocks and about three months to make, because the ink must dry between layers.
The gold comes last. He prints the outlines in oil-based ink, presses gold leaf across the whole wet sheet, and lets it sit for a month — the ink holding the leaf only where he printed. Then he brushes the rest away.
Read Sekino's full story — the son of a sōsaku-hanga master, and the print Empress Michiko chose for the Imperial Palace.
