Help! 1976

A 1976 etching whose exclamatory title points toward a narrative or figural subject rather than landscape — Hansen produced figural and domestic work alongside his Vashon Island scenes throughout the 1970s. The dated title also places the print in the United States bicentennial year, though there is no direct evidence the image is occasional in that sense. Etching as a medium gave Hansen the linear vocabulary he had developed during his 1953 Fulbright study of etching at the Munich Akademie, and his figural prints from this period tend to handle bodies, garments, and interior space with the same close hatched line he used for tree bark or grass. Without a fuller visual record one can only place the work within the general category of his small-format figural etchings of the mid-1970s, in which the everyday is approached with a slightly off-key humor — a tone the punctuated title here would seem to support.