Yoshiko Yamamoto
at The Framer’s Workshop
The artist's journey began in Berkeley
Yoshiko Yamamoto is a contemporary printmaker living and working in Kamakura, Japan. However, her artistic journey as a printmaker began here in Berkeley — first as a student at CAL and, in the mid-1990s, as the founder of The Arts & Crafts Press. This places her squarely within Berkeley’s printmaking tradition shaped by artists such as David Lance Goines, while also drawing on the Japanese printmaking heritage she grew up with.
Her original letterpress and woodblock prints bridge these two aesthetics. Letterpress printed in limited editions, all are out of print and only a few editions are commercially available. The pieces we carry at The Framer’s Workshop are framed with archival materials and UV-filtering acrylic to insure decades of enjoyment in the homes where they live.
Yoshiko & Berkeley
The Framer’s Workshop was one of the first retail businesses to regularly feature Yoshiko’s prints. Our shop is where many local collectors first discovered her work.
Soon after the turn of the century, Yoshiko moved her studio to Washington State, where she expanded it to include an impressive collection of vintage mechanical presses. There for over 20 years, Yoshiko perfected the art of seeing and revealing the extraordinary in the ordinary. Se produced dozens of editions featuring local flora and fauna, landmarks and landscapes, occasional illustrations and stunning visions of California and the Pacific Northwest.
All of these early letterpress editions and are out of print and only a few remain commercially available.
In 2007, we commissioned Yoshiko to design and letterpress printed poster announcing The Framer’s Workshop’s 30th Anniversary. Her composition features The Berkeley Rose Garden with the original wooden pergola, conceived by architect Bernard Maybeck.
The slide show presents a small sample of Yoshiko's original Bay Area and California related limited editions. Except for The Berkeley Rose Garden all of them are out of print, sold out, and not commercially available. Follow this link to see our available Yoshiko Yamamoto limited edition letterpress prints. The section below features all the Yoshiko Yamamoto work we carry.
Yoshiko Yamamoto Prints & Tiles
The Framer’s Workshop carries a variety of Yoshiko Yamamoto prints and tiles. Everything we show is sold framed as a finished piece ready to hang and live beautiful on your wall.
From Letterpress Presses to Hand-Carved Woodblocks
In 2020 Yoshiko made a decisive change. After years of building recognition as a printmaker and running a successful studio business, she chose to close her Tacoma studio and find new homes for her family of presses: Heidi, Vandy, Gordon and Windmill; aka her “artistic partners in crime."
Yoshiko's sensitive love of nature led her away from machines, longing to return to a more intimate, hand-centered way of working. As she put it at the time, she loved the old presses, but they are machines—and she felt drawn toward tools and materials that are more ecological, tactile, and “natural, human” in the way they’re used.
Today, working from her home studio in Kamakura, Yoshiko is increasingly focused on traditional Japanese water-based woodblock printmaking (mokuhanga). Instead of steel and motors, her practice now centers on hand-made paper, hand-carved blocks, brushes, barens, and carefully chosen pigments. It is slower work, but it brings her closer to the landscapes, seasons, and everyday moments that have always inspired her prints.
Excerpts from
A Living Arts & Crafts Tradition in a Digital Age
Yoshiko’s move toward mokuhanga isn’t just a technical shift; it reflects the values that have shaped her work from the beginning. She often cites William Morris—whose Arts & Crafts ideas helped inspire Berkeley’s early 20th-century architecture and design—as a touchstone. One Morris line she returns to is: “The reward of labor is life. And is that not enough?”
For Yoshiko, that “reward” is found in the quiet rhythm of carving, the sound of the baren moving across the paper, and the way each impression carries the small variations of human touch. She also looks to both Japanese and Western printmakers—artists such as Hiroshi Yoshida, Hasui Kawase, and California block printer Frances Gearhart—for models of work that balances refined technique with a bold, tactile presence on the paper.
Morris imagined a future where people could live more harmoniously with nature, making useful and beautiful things by hand. Yoshiko’s studio practice is one way of testing that ideal in our own century: using traditional Japanese methods, sustainable materials where possible, and a scale of work that keeps her in direct contact with every stage of the process.
At the same time, she is fully aware that we now live in a world of digital tools and AI systems that can generate images instantly. In public talks she has asked, in different ways, why we still bother making things by hand when software can do so much so quickly—and then answers that question by pointing to the simple joy people still find in cooking, knitting, drawing, or printing. As long as we remain human, she suggests, we will want to make things ourselves.
Her mokuhanga prints carry that conviction. In a culture where images can be endlessly copied, each impression is slightly different: a “perfectly imperfect” record of time, pressure, breath, and attention.
Below are two short interviews with Yoshiko Yamamoto. in Celebrating Craft: A Printmakers Inspiration (2:15), Yoshiko talks about the artists who have inspired her and why. In Celebrating Craft: 'It Makes Me Always Almost Cry,' The Handcrafted Ideals of William Morris (3:51), Yoshiko explains how the ideals of William Morris have influenced her art and life.