Tom Killion is a procrastinator—and also a master printmaker.
He bought a brand-new MacBook Pro in 2023 and didn’t open it until 2026, even though his old laptop was on the brink of extinction. The top-of-the-line machine sat on a shelf in his Inverness Park printing studio, Quail Press, collecting dust until a few weeks ago, when he finally got around to opening it.
In early 2024, he set out to make a print for the Thanksgiving Point Reyes Open Studios. Mr. Killion finished in time for Thanksgiving 2025.
But the result was glorious: a spectacular print of towering redwoods along the banks of Lagunitas Creek, the blue water punctuated with bursts of orange and yellow leaves in their fall glory. In minute detail, Mr. Killion carved 10 separate woodblocks to make the final print—work that, fortunately for Mr. Killion, demands patience and precision, not punctuality.
Like all his work, the print recalls those of the Japanese printmakers he fell in love with as a child, especially Katsushika Hokusai, the prolific 18th- and 19-century woodblock master who is one of Japan’s most famous artists. For Mr. Killion, who grew up in Mill Valley with Mount Tamalpais as his backyard playground, Hokusai’s prints of Mount Fuji resonated.
A documentary showing at the Larkspur Cinema this weekend depicts Mr. Killion’s 2018 journey to Japan, where he spent a week working with Kenji Takenaka, a fifth-generation printer and one of the last to employ the hand-printing techniques used by Hokusai and his Edo-period contemporaries.
“Hokusai’s art, especially his series of prints of Mount Fuji, really just struck deep into me when I was a kid,” Mr. Killion says during the film. “I just adored them. They somehow looked to me like they were the world that I imagined I could live in. A handmade world, right? Not a world of machines.”
“Journey to Hokusai” was shot by Mr. Killion’s good friend, Chikara Motomura, a Corte Madera resident. It was warmly received at the Mill Valley Film Festival, but the pandemic disrupted Mr. Motomura’s plans to screen it more widely. This weekend’s showings will offer fans of Mr. Killion’s work—and he has many in Marin and beyond—a chance to follow his pilgrimage to the homeland of the man whose work inspired his career.
Mr. Motomura had worked in the film and television industry for 37 years and performed virtually every production task except for directing, a role he had long aspired to fulfill. He was casting about for a documentary subject when he realized his friend had an interesting story to tell.
“Tom told me he had always wanted to go to Japan to learn hand printing, because that’s the only part of his creative process that is not authentic,” Mr. Motomura said. “Everything else, he does in a very traditional way.”
Mr. Killion, 72, carves his woodblocks with tools imported from Japan that are pieces of art in themselves, and he uses only the highest quality Japanese paper. But unlike traditional Japanese artists, he uses a hand-cranked German press and oil paints, which are applied to rollers that transfer the image to paper.
The old masters of ukiyo-e, as the Japanese genre is known, used powdered pigmentation, mixing it with water and applying it by hand directly to the woodblock. That technique, called moku hanga, requires finesse. The paper is placed directly over the woodblock, and the artist then burnishes it with a baren—a disc-like hand tool with a flat bottom and a knotted handle. Applying just the right stroke and pressure is crucial for achieving the correct shades and textures.
Mr. Killion printed the piece featured in the film, “Moonlit Sierra Pines,” from five separate blocks. Shrouded in darkness and framed by deep blues, the towering lodgepole pines seem to be very much alive, breathing as their branches form a twisted web.
The film intersperses scenes of Mr. Killion toiling away in the workshop with his visits to ancient cities and historic sites, including a shrine to a papermaker who took up his craft 1,500 years ago and whose descendants continue the tradition to this day.
Unlike Mr. Killion, Hokusai and his contemporaries had teams of helpers. The artist supplied the vision; his assistants executed it. For Mr. Killion—who did the work Japanese-style, scrunched beneath a table just a few inches off the floor, without a chair—working solo taxed both his knees and his fortitude, with many a frustrating false start and discarded sheet of paper.
“By the evening of the second day I was really getting depressed about the whole project,” Mr. Killion says during the film. “After all that work I put in this summer carving the blocks, should I just throw up my hands?”
Of course, he persists. And succeeds.
A group gathers in the workshop to admire his freshly printed work. “Very beautiful,” one woman says. “Wonderful details,” says another.
Kenji, the sensei, is also pleased.
“Initially my goal was to help Tom bring his print closer to a traditional Japanese print,” he says. “But after working with Tom, I realized he already knew what a traditional Japanese print was. He’d already studied and digested it. He came to me to confirm his understanding, and this print confirms his understanding.”
Mr. Killion began selling drawings at the Mill Valley Fall Arts Festival when he was a 14-year-old student at Tam High. His studio took its name from one of them, a pen-and-ink drawing of two quails crossing a field in the foreground and Elephant Mountain—he prefers that name to Black Mountain—in the background. The meadow is black and white, the mountain a brown wash.
His father loved the piece so much, he tried to get it back from a neighbor who bought it—one Mr. Robbins, who refused to return it despite the elder Killion’s pleadings. Years later, one of Mr. Robbins’s four daughters sold it back to Tom, and it now hangs in his studio.
To cheer up his bereft dad at the time, Mr. Killion made a linocut rendition of the drawing, with a single quail in the foreground and a red sun in the place of the mountain. “It turned out to be a very popular print,” he said. “It was the first successful print that I sold at these art fairs.”
It is spare, striking and, with its rising red sun, feels very Japanese.
The rest of Mr. Killion’s life could keep Mr. Motomura busy making documentaries for the remainder of his filmmaking career. He has published five handmade books, one a collaboration with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gary Snyder. He has hitchhiked across the Sahara, kayaked down the Niger River, been jailed during a coup d’etat in the West African nation of Benin, worked with Ethiopian refugees in Sudan, earned a Ph.D. in African history from Stanford, and taught West African history at Bowdoin College and San Francisco State.
Along the way, he did a brief stint as a carpet cleaner before realizing that printmaking would be a more fulfilling path.
With the proceeds from his second handmade book, published in 1977, he made the hitchhiking trip with three Frenchmen from Marseilles who picked him up in Tunis in a Dodge Power Wagon—a heavy-duty, military-style pickup that had been shipped across the Atlantic for the D-Day invasion at Normandy.
But those are stories for another day, or another movie.
Mr. Killion and Mr. Motomura will give talks at some of this weekend’s screenings. For tickets and information, go to https://tinyurl.com/JourneyToHokusai