Original artwork description:

Over the last 200 years Japanese woodblock printing has influenced artists of wildly contrasting styles - from Vincent van Gogh through Roy Lichtenstein to Julian Opie. Van Gogh even said: 'All my work is based to some extent on Japanese art.' Hummm. It would be as hard to detect similarities in style between Van Gogh's 'Starry Night' and Hokusai's 'Great Wave Off Kanagawa' as it would between Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Tins and Caravaggio's Beheading of St John the Baptist, but who are we to argue with the great man? Woodblock printing, with its dearth of great detail and heavy outlines, is much more in tune with the styles of Lichtenstein and Opie. It is difficult, however, to recreate woodblock processes without actually carving a woodblock: the trees in this scene were applied with the rough side of a pan scrubber and the stripes hand painted by carefully running the brush along a metal ruler. This picture is a woodblock print lovechild of Roy Lichtenstein and Julian Opie.

Materials used:

Acrylics

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