"White Line" Prints by Toshi Yoshida

I just discovered that Toshi Yoshida, who wrote the book Japanese Printmaking that I reviewed in the last post, did a series of prints that he referred to as 'white line' prints in the 1960s. Although he was inspired by the Provincetown white line method, Toshi Yoshida's white line prints were actually multi-block facsimiles of Provincetown prints.

An article about Yoshida's white line series on the Hanga Gallery web site says "The traditional method of creating a white line print uses a single carved matrix block, which is hand-painted with multiple colors inside each of the outlined sections… Toshi's white line prints imitated the style of the earlier Provincetown prints, but they were printed using multiple blocks in large, unlimited editions."

The web page from a 2013 show of Toshi Yoshida's white line prints at Worcester Art Museum (Massachusetts) explains that some of the white lines were actually embossed using un-inked keyblocks.

Even though these aren't white line prints in the strict sense, I feel inspired by them in my pursuit of white line nirvana.