Owl 1959

This is an owl, made by Leonard Baskin. It's a print, so it probably involved carving into a block, maybe wood, and then inking it to create the image. I think of the artist in his studio, carefully incising the wood, the image slowly emerging. The dark shape is punctuated by all these tiny marks, all those individual feathers. It’s a painstaking process, requiring a lot of focus. The owl is a shape, like an oval, and Baskin has used the shape to his advantage to create an intense but contained energy. It's small, but it feels big. He made lots of prints of birds, didn’t he? Maybe he was trying to get at something about freedom. There’s something timeless about prints, they feel ancient but also immediate. It’s like Baskin is in conversation with all the printmakers who have come before, isn't he? Each adding their own voice to the chorus.