Hillside Farm #3

The third state in Hansen's Hillside Farm sequence, this 1997 hand-coloured etching depicts the kind of small terraced farmstead common to Vashon Island and the broader Puget Sound countryside — likely a cluster of weathered outbuildings, fence lines, and pasture stepped into a sloping hillside. As an intaglio print, the image is built from an inked line plate worked in fine etched contour, then individually tinted in watercolour after printing, so each impression in the edition carries slightly different colour weights across roof, field, and sky. The numbered title indicates Hansen's habitual return to a single motif across multiple plates and states, refining the placement of structures and the balance of cultivated and uncultivated ground rather than seeking a definitive version. The combination of European etching technique — the medium he studied at the Akademie in Munich on his 1953 Fulbright — with the rural Pacific Northwest subject matter that occupied him throughout his fifty-year catalogue is characteristic of his late work, in which the disciplines absorbed in Germany were turned consistently toward the agrarian landscape of his home island.