Tiger Blood Lily (Black)

Tiger Blood Lily (Black) treats one of the spotted, recurved-petalled lilies — likely Lilium lancifolium or a related cultivar with tiger-marked tepals — and the parenthetical Black indicates a state pulled in a single dark ink rather than as a coloured plate. Doyle works the bite of copper-sulphate etching to differentiate two surfaces the lily makes available: the smooth, glossy ground of the tepal, and the raised dark spots that give the flower its common name. Aquatint is the natural vehicle for those markings, registered as small, hard-edged passages of dense tone against more lightly bitten ground. The print's classification under the catalogue's Animals tag is presumably a function of the tiger in the title — the spotted lily having been read since the Linnaean period as carrying the markings of another animal entirely. The work continues Doyle's practice of returning to garden specimens with the slow, observational discipline of intaglio printmaking carried out at Graphic Studio Dublin.