The Mandrake 2000

Jim Dine’s ‘The Mandrake’ is a print of a plant. It’s got this great moody ground with an almost cartoonish plant emerging from the centre. You can almost imagine Dine in the process of making this print, working with the heavy plate and the press, coaxing the image out with layers of ink and pressure. I sympathize with him, imagining him thinking about earlier artists like Redon, but wanting to create something more raw and immediate. See how the leaves are made up of these soft, blurred lines, while the stem has a rough, almost brutal texture? It feels like he’s playing with different ways of seeing and feeling, letting the materials guide him. And that dark outline around the image? It's like he's framing a little world, inviting us to step inside and get lost in the textures and the shadows. I love that sense of exploration, that feeling that anything is possible on the surface of a print, or painting. We are all in conversation, influencing each other across time. That’s what makes art so exciting.