Music II

The Roman numeral indicates a serial relationship to an earlier Music print, marking this as a continuation rather than a stand-alone image. Etching produces the work entirely through bitten line: the artist draws through a hard or soft ground laid on a copper plate, immerses the plate in mordant, and the resulting recessed lines carry the printed image. Soft-ground etching in particular permits the transfer of textured materials — fabric, paper, even pressed objects — into the bitten matrix, a quality that suits subjects involving cloth, hair, or the textures associated with stringed instruments. The 2024 date places the print at the start of a multi-year engagement with music as a recurring subject, sitting alongside Chord from the same year and continuing into 2025 with Passing by Familiar Strings. The work belongs to a body of prints in which sound — an inherently temporal phenomenon — is translated into the still, tonal register of the etched plate, raising questions about how the visual conventions of intaglio can register what is fundamentally heard rather than seen.