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unit 3
4. Extension to Art
The Great Wave Off Kanagawa
have you ever seen this
painting? it probably seems
vaguely familiar to you. it is an
iconic piece in Japanese art,
and was created around 1830.
many people have copies of
it. The famed metropolitan
museum of art in New York
has one, for example, along
with many other prestigious
museums. But, actually, it
isn’t a painting at all. it is a
woodblock print. Woodblock
printing is a bit different from
painting in a few ways. The first
difference is that ink is used
instead of paint. The second
difference is the way that the
ink gets on the paper. painting means using a paintbrush, or other tool, to spread paint on a surface, be it paper, canvas, wood, or anything else. Woodblock printing uses what its name says, blocks of wood, as a sort of stamp. These printings can be incredibly complicated, and use more than one block of wood to use different colors, or they can be simple and use only one. These woodblocks can be used many times. it’s thought that the original woodblock for the “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” (the print seen above) was used to create around 5,000 copies! imagine using a stamp to make that many prints! and they are all worth a fortune. one was sold in 2002 for 1,350,000 euros!
Woodblock printing, or xylography, as it is also known, started around the year 220. It was the most popular way to print text, patterns, or images until the 1800s. It was first invented in China, and spread out to all of eastern asia, just like the shiansha mentioned in
unit
http://hinmrec.hnei.hawaii.edu/
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