About the artist

Roslyn Kean is one of Australia’s most respected and admired printmakers. Whereas many artists of her generation were inspired by the modernist mythology of the rejection of tradition and proceeded to overthrow the prevailing norms in art, Kean in her art practice sought to embrace an ancient printmaking tradition and to give it new life within a contemporary context. 

After initial art training in Sydney followed by further study at The Slade in London, it was while studying in Tokyo and already aged in her early thirties, that Kean was completely seduced by traditional Japanese woodblock printmaking – mokuhanga – and became deeply immersed in Japanese cultural traditions. Now, almost forty years later, Kean is an internationally recognised practitioner of mokuhanga and is revered by her peers as an outstanding print artist, an inspirational teacher and a sage.

When Kean developed her expertise in mokuhanga techniques and became deeply immersed in Japanese cultural traditions, she also brought with her a passion for geometry and colour into her artmaking. 

About the author

Sasha Grishin AM, FAHA is an Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University in Canberra, who works internationally as an art historian, art critic and curator. He studied at the universities of Melbourne, Moscow, London and Oxford and has served several terms as visiting scholar at Harvard University. In 2004 he was elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, in 2005 he was awarded the Order of Australia (AM) for services to Australian art and art history and in 2008 was awarded a Citation for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning. He has published over thirty books and over two thousand articles and catalogue essays dealing with various aspects of art. In 2013 his massive Australian Art: A history was published by Melbourne University Publishing. In 2015, his monographs on John Wolseley (Thames and Hudson), Inge King (Macmillan) and S.T. Gill (National Library of Australia) were published. In 2022 his books on Erwin Fabian (Australian Galleries), Murray Walker (Beagle Press) and Joyce Evans (National Library of Australia) appeared in print.