Forest 1975

"Forest 1975" continues the year-titled sequence Hansen began with "Forest 1974," treating the wooded interior of Vashon Island as a recurring subject revisited across successive seasons. The bare titling — only the noun and year — emphasizes serial observation rather than a single defining motif, and within his catalogue these year-stamped forests function as a kind of running graphic journal. Compositionally, an unpeopled forest etching of this type typically organizes itself around a small set of dominant trunks placed in the foreground or middle distance, with receding verticals dissolving into more open hatching at the edges of the plate. Hansen's handling of bitten line, drypoint, and selectively wiped plate tone allows the same site to read differently from one print to the next, registering changes in foliage density, moisture, and ambient light. Together with "Forest Clearing — January 1975," the print belongs to a tighter 1975 group within the broader Vashon forest cycle.