By Cinara Marquis
After a series of artist residencies, printmaker Melissa Schulenberg found herself enthralled with a completely new medium — mokuhanga, a traditional Japanese woodblock printing technique that uses water-based inks and Japanese paper. She recently visited SUNY Plattsburgh to talk about the medium.
Growing up in Michigan and South Dakota, Schulenberg was always interested in drawing and painting, but it wasn’t until college that she discovered her passion for printmaking.
Schulenberg received her bachelors of art in studio art from Bowdoin College in Maine, a masters of art in printmaking from Purdue University in Indiana, and finally her masters of fine arts in printmaking from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She teaches various printmaking, drawing and book art courses as Professor in Fine Arts at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York.
Schulenberg’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, most notably in Australia, Ireland, Japan and New Zealand.
Her work takes inspiration from her surroundings — Schulenberg explores unusual compositions, patterns and shapes in her work. She describes her investigations as an “alphabet” of stripes, humps and stumps, scars, thread, totems, shadows, woven textures and torus shapes, to name a few.
JAPAN
In 2006, St. Lawrence University offered Schulenberg a free trip to Japan to study Japanese printmaking — it was her first introduction to mokuhanga, a traditional Japanese woodblock printing technique.
“It was absolutely amazing,” Schulenberg said.
She was inspired, but when she came back to the United States, she didn’t know exactly what to do with this inspiration.
“I saw (the mokuhanga), but I didn’t really know how to do it,” she said.
Ten years later, though, she had a chance encounter with a colleague, and she was invited once again to Japan — this time for the International Mokuhanga Conference. Schulenberg immediately signed up for a two-day workshop at the conference, where she learned the basics of the art form and how to use Japanese tools.
She fell in love with the medium, and that same summer she ended up in her first residency at the Mokuhanga Innovation Laboratory in Kawaguchiko.
“It’s like heaven for a residency because every day you look out and Mount Fuji is literally right there,” Schulenberg said.
She found vast multitudes of inspiration from the scenes at the residency, from their beautifully cultivated gardens to the texture of the tatami floors.
The Mokuhanga Innovation Laboratory was founded in 2011 as an artist program to provide extensive knowledge of mokuhanga to international artists and printmakers. There, Schulenberg learned more specialized skills, such as how to sharpen carving tools and prepare a Japanese woodblock for print.
Unlike many residencies, the laboratory was a shared studio.
“But that’s actually one of the benefits of it,” Schulenberg explained. “(We) six or seven artists would all be working in the same studio. But it wasn’t just sharing the studio; it’s sharing encounters, it’s sharing ideas and also sharing beer as well in the afternoon.”
She said that the conversations with other artists that happened during the residency were equally as beneficial as all the instruction that they received.
“That camaraderie is something that has carried over with the other residencies,” Schulenberg said.
She stayed at the Mokuhanga Innovation Laboratory for its second residency, which was for advanced mokuhanga artists. This began with introductions on how to use ornamental gold leaf.
Following her second residency, in 2019 Schulenberg and fellow artists in the program proposed an advanced-advanced residency program. The director of the laboratory agreed and created a new program including weeks of instruction on sharpening specialized carving tools, sizing traditional Japanese paper, using bronzing powder and making and fixing barons.
MOKUHANGA SISTERS
After the last residency at the Mokuhanga Innovation Laboratory in Japan ended in 2019, Schulenberg and seven other resident artists celebrated with a dinner. The director of the program had told the artists how awed he was at their connection, saying that they were like sisters.
That night, the Mokuhanga Sisters were created. The collective includes Katie Baldwin, Patty Hudak, Mariko Jesse, Kate MacDonagh, Yoonmi Nam, Natasha Norman, Mia O, Lucy May Schofield and Schulenberg.
The group of nine women come from all over the world; Japan, South Korea, the United States, South Africa, the United Kingdom and Ireland, all are connected through mokuhanga. The sisters have been meeting once a month over Zoom for the last four years.
Together they have completed six projects, including “Borderless Scroll,” 2021; “The World Between the Block and the Paper,” 2022, exhibition at the Southern Vermont Arts Center in Manchester, Vermont; “Between Worlds: Mokuhanga,” 2022, exhibition at the Kentler International Drawing Space in Brooklyn, New York; “New Prints Off the Block,” and “Wood, Paper, Ink,” 2022, exhibitions at the Richard F. Brush Art Gallery at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York; and, “MASABAN,” 2024, an exhibition at the Udatsu Paper and Craft Museum in Echizen, Japan.
PRESENTATION
Schulenberg visited SUNY Plattsburgh on Oct. 16 as the second presenter of the fall 2024 semester’s Visual Artist Series.
Organized by the faculty and students and funded by the Student Association through the Campus Arts Council, the Visual Artist Series aims to bring seven to nine artists from a wide variety of mediums to campus each year. It offers public lectures, workshops and demonstrations.
The next presenter is Tawni Shuler, a Wyoming drawing and painting artist who will be presenting via Zoom at 5 p.m. on Oct. 30.
Visit Melissa Schulenberg’s website at https://melissaschulenberg.com/.
Learn more about the Mokuhanga Sisters and view their projects at https://mokuhangasisters.com/.
