Known for her “off-hand intimacy,” Mari Eastman paints women, landscapes, animals, and flowers. Through its subject–a fox–and its small scale, this new woodblock print embodies the artist’s affinities for ambience and affect. Visually, it also draws on the artist’s distinctly brushy color application–which writer Alex Jen once characterized as a kind of painterly “traffic” on her works’ surfaces.

Untitled (Gray Fox), emerged from Eastman’s interest in the print-based works of Edvard Munch and Japanese woodcuts, specifically Ukiyo-e prints, which depict the fleeting pleasures of everyday life in Japan. In them one might see a Kabuki actor, a beautiful woman, or a halcyon vista. Munch’s woodcuts and lithographs, however, are often moodier depictions of lovers or individuals emerging from darkness or set against the backdrop of a barren landscape.

Across Eastman’s oeuvre, we certainly find Ukiyo-e’s observational pleasures. But because her subjects aren’t performing (or necessarily aware they are being watched) her works manifest a psychic space that can be at once honest, sincere, and fleeting. Or, to many, they render as memories. In Untitled (Gray Fox), the animal is momentarily frozen for us in time and in space; it looks beyond the frame at something we cannot see. Behind the fox, space subtly changes across the edition’s 34 prints via a gradient effect, similar to Bokashi, common in Ukiyo-e prints. Others register more of a textured grain which has a flattening effect common to Munch.

Each print in the edition is different from the next, made directly in response to the prior print. In this and other ways, the edition is a record of Eastman’s curiosity and play in the studio. For example it was the careful layering of transparent colors–as is common with Japanese woodblocking techniques– with darker colors behind lighter colors, that four wood blocks could produce an image with more than four colors. Throughout the process, the block was manipulated to explore how subtle color shifts could affect the image’s mood and tone. Eastman’s exploratory hand-carved “marks” were recorded in print in a manner that resonates with the move of a brush over canvas.

Over the years, many have observed in her work nostalgia characterized by sincerity. As we emerge from the summer of 2025, euphoric 1990s imaginary has piqued and permeated the culture (Oasis, slip dresses, cigarettes) while political cacophony rages around us. This small fox, like many of Eastman’s artworks, offers a moment of pause and escape while still reflecting back to us something about ourselves. In its ambiance and style, and by being somehow both specific and not specific, Eastman’s subject conveys a zeitgeist without pinning it down.