La nuit tentaculaire 1969

Joan Miró made this print, La nuit tentaculaire, using etching and aquatint; processes involving acid, metal plates, and a printing press. The title of the work translates from French to English as "The Tentacular Night," which is exactly how I feel when I can't sleep! Miró must have been an insomniac too. What does this night feel like to you? I feel a kind of playful anxiety looking at the composition. It seems that the dark, inky, amorphous shapes are crawling all over a rough grid. Are they menacing or mischievous? I imagine Miró hunched over the plate, scraping and biting into the metal, conjuring these dreamlike forms. Miró's biomorphic forms share a close kinship with the work of other surrealist artists like Yves Tanguy and Max Ernst, all of whom were plumbing the depths of the unconscious. It makes me think that the best art comes from the depths of one’s internal world.