Work No. 3

Numbered without further descriptive title, Work No. 3 belongs to the body of plates in which Hamanishi has refined his control of tonal range across an unbroken mezzotint field. Catalogued as an etching, the print is produced through the intaglio process for which the artist is known, with the copper plate prepared by mechanical rocking to raise a uniform burr before being selectively burnished to recover passages of light. The serial numbering, characteristic of Hamanishi's studio output, signals the artist's preference for letting the print's visual particulars speak without literary framing. Works of this designation typically present an isolated natural subject — leaf, feather, seed pod, or shell — set against the saturated black ground that mezzotint alone produces with such depth. The technical demands of the process, requiring several hundred hours of plate preparation, place Hamanishi among the small number of contemporary printmakers willing to sustain mezzotint at this scale.