Edutainment > David Stones born 1945

This article was written and published with the assistance and approval by David Stones. All images are for personal viewing purposes only and are protected by copyrights. They may not be copied or distributed without the prior permission of the artist.

David Stones in his studio

If you are a collector of Japanese prints, you are certainly familiar with names like Hasui, the Yoshida family, Elizabeth Keith or Paul Jacoulet. And you may sometimes have thought "If I had only discovered them earlier, when their prints were available for a fraction of what they cost today."

We want to open your eyes to contemporary ukiyo-e art and bring you directly together with the best living artists in traditional Japanese woodblock printmaking. David Stones is one of them.

Western Printmakers in Japan

Western artists coming to Japan and working in the traditional Japanese printmaking style have a long tradition. For the first half of the twentieth century, the best known names are Elizabeth Keith and Paul Jacoulet. But few of even the serious collectors of ukiyo-e know about the contemporary Western artists working in the traditional Japanese style.

This is now changing. Artists like David Stones, or Paul Binnie are on the verge of being discovered by a worldwide art market and an audience of ukiyo-e collectors on the Internet. And while the Japanese had completely disregarded their own printmaking tradition at the beginning of the twentieth century, the situation is now different. The Japanese government tries to encourage and revitalize traditional arts and crafts. Japanese TV broadcast a report about David Stones at prime time. The situation is indeed a bit bizarre. Foreign artists have become an important factor in preserving old Japanese arts and crafts traditions.

David Stones - 30 Years in Japan

Atsuta Sailing
copyright David Stones

Born in England, David Stones attended Lincoln College of Art studying printing and design. It was in the late sixties - The Beatles, swinging London, the Pop revolution and the flower-power movement in San Francisco. Many young people in Europe and Northern America traveled to Asia to discover the world and to find new answers. David was one of them.

Leaving his job as a letterpress printer, David Stones began a slow and wandering trip through Europe and into Asia arriving in Australia in 1968. First visiting Japan in 1971, he returned there in 1972 and started teaching English. And while browsing through a bookstore in Nagoya, David discovered the world of woodblock prints and decided to step into the tradition of Japanese printmaking. He sought lessons from long-established print-maker Tomikichiro Tokuriki, of Kyoto. With his guidance, he began to produce his own small prints in Nagoya. Trial and error gave much experience.

In 1983, his first solo show opened in the small city of Okazaki. Other successful exhibitions have followed in Japan and in the United Kingdom.

The Making of a David Stones' Print

Shirakawa in Winter - Snow
copyright David Stones

The situation of printmaking in Japan is now different from the days of Watanabe Shozaburo and the Shin Hanga movement. A Japanese print used to be the collaborative result of the team work of four different people - the artist, the carver, the printer and the publisher. In its purest form the artist made the design and the carver and the printer transformed it into the finished product. The publisher coordinated the process and was responsible for selling.

The craftsmen such as the carvers and printmakers have now nearly disappeared according to David Stones. Thus the artist has to do all steps necessary to produce a contemporary Japanese print by himself. This is time-consuming. And while artists like Hokusai or Kunisada could produce up to 20,000 different designs during their lifetime, David Stones makes only six or seven new prints per year.

Moving from a small house in urban Nagoya to near Okazaki in Aichi Prefecture in a rural area has given a fresh impetus to David Stones' creativity. The subjects for his prints come from what he sees around him - old farm houses, traditional architecture or an old factory wall at night lit by a warm light coming from an old lamp.

David Stones and his wife Akiko had moved into an old farmhouse which they renovated from the ground up. The house has a workshop and a gallery showroom for visitors. The environment is very important for David. He appreciates the machine-free process of woodblock printing. For the blocks only wood from cherry, magnolia and katsura trees can be used. David and Akiko plant three or four new trees around their house for each one cut down to produce the blocks.

David Stones uses only hand-made Japanese washi paper and acid-free mats. The environmental friendliness and the quality of the tools and the materials are paramount for him.

Buying Prints by David Stones

You can buy David Stones' prints by contacting him directly via his web site The Woodblock Prints of David Stones.

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