Matt Brown makes color woodblock prints using the Japanese Hanga method. His imagery explores the development of pictorial printed woodblock. By using techniques which build on intimate aspects of the Japanese approach affecting texture and tone (variations in printing pressure, fades in the brushing of pigments) he tries to achieve happy resolutions of the tension between flat printed shapes and an illusion of a depicted place.

Hanga is a printing technique utilizing brushes and  a hand-held barren using rice paste, pigments, and water from multiple hand carved wood blocks. It is the technique used to make the ukiyo-e prints of Hokusai, Hiroshige, and others that had so much impact on Western artists, especially the Impressionists, in the latter part of the 19th century.