Owls in the Wind

A composition featuring more than one owl in a windswept moment, expanding Ikuta's typically solitary owl imagery into a grouped arrangement. The mezzotint medium suits the subject: the soft tonal range coaxed from a fully rocked plate gives the owls' plumage its characteristic velvety surface, while the implied motion of wind can be registered through directional burnishing across both feather and surrounding atmosphere. The artist would have built up the saturated dark ground first and then scraped and burnished selectively to reveal the birds, leaving the bulk of the plate untouched as the nocturnal field that frames his work. The 2005 dating places this within his mature owl period. By introducing multiple birds and placing them within a moment of weather, the composition departs from the still, votive quality of his single-owl portraits toward a more situational reading, while staying within the contained, dark-ground vocabulary that he developed and refined across decades of intaglio practice.