Hotel Lounge

"Hotel Lounge" extends the interior genre observation seen in Hansen's earlier "Four Men in Conversation," moving the etcher's attention from a small group portrait into a more architecturally defined public room. A hotel lounge — likely one of the modest establishments in the small towns near Vashon Island or in Seattle — would typically furnish him with seated figures, lamps, upholstered chairs, low tables, and a window or doorway, arranged into the kind of orthogonal interior that etching renders with particular clarity. Hansen's Munich-trained line and his familiarity with twentieth-century European etching practice show in the use of layered hatching to distinguish wood, fabric, and atmosphere, and in the controlled use of plate tone to suggest indoor electric light. The print belongs to a brief mid-career period in which Hansen worked on populated interiors before his attention shifted toward the unpeopled or sparsely peopled forest subjects of 1974 and 1975.