Iris 1984

This is Jim Dine's "Iris", an etching on paper. It’s all about the scrappy, gritty process of mark-making. Dine dives into the materiality of the printmaking process, right? The texture is raw, almost like a blueprint of his emotions. Look closely – you can almost feel the scratch of the needle across the plate. It’s not just a picture of an iris, it's about the act of drawing, the way the hand moves and the tool bites into the surface. See the flower itself, kind of looming? It’s built up from a mass of tiny, frenetic lines, as though the artist were trying to capture not just the shape of the flower, but its very essence, its fleeting beauty. Dine’s work always makes me think of Cy Twombly, that beautiful, scribbly mess of feeling. He makes something so delicate as an iris seem tough, like life itself.