Iris Landscape 1980

"Iris Landscape" combines a foreground study of iris blooms with a recessive landscape view, a compositional device Hansen drew from the kacho-e (bird-and-flower) tradition while extending it into a fuller pictorial space. As a color lithograph, the image was built up from successive stone or plate impressions, each carrying one color layer—a technique well suited to the soft tonal washes Hansen favored for petal and foliage. The iris held particular weight in Japanese print tradition, appearing in works by Hokusai, Hiroshige, and the early shin-hanga masters; Hansen's 1980 treatment translates that iconography into a Vashon Island idiom, where the marsh iris was naturalized along ponds and roadside ditches near his home. The print belongs to a group of dated 1980 lithographs in which Hansen tested how flower studies could be embedded in, rather than isolated from, the surrounding terrain, anticipating the integrated still-life-and-landscape compositions that would recur in his later etchings.