Anatomical Space

The title indicates an investigation of bodily form as spatial structure, likely abstracting organic interior architecture — bone, cavity, tissue — into a flat printed plane. Reductive woodcut, sometimes called the suicide-block method, requires the artist to print the lightest colour first and progressively cut away material from a single block for each successive layer; this destroys the matrix as the edition is completed, making the run finite and irreversible. Crothers worked in an edition of fifty for this print, and impressions entered the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The work belongs to a paired set with Emotional Space, both produced at the close of his eighteen-year period working primarily in Tokyo. The pairing suggests a deliberate dichotomy between physical and psychological registers of interior life. The reductive method's tonal layering is suited to evocations of depth and overlapping form, while the water-based approach he absorbed at Tama Art University, Tokyo, gives the impression a softer matte surface than oil-based Western relief printing.