Clearing and Burning

An etching depicting the rural practice of clearing land and burning the resulting brush and slash, a common sight on Vashon Island and across logged-over areas of the Puget Sound region in the postwar decades. The subject would have given Hansen an opportunity to work with smoke, fire, and the broken topography of stumps and felled limbs — passages for which etching, with its capacity for fine hatched line and aquatint-like plate tone, is well suited. Smoke could be carried by stopped-out areas left lighter against worked plate; charred ground and blackened wood by densely bitten line. The piece belongs with his other 1975 landscape etchings of the island, and it shares with them an eye for the working surface of the land rather than picturesque scenery. The choice connects to a wider strand in his catalogue concerned with the marks left by farming and timber on the Vashon hillsides he had known since his childhood there.