Iris 1916

Arthur Bowen Davies made this artwork, *Iris*, with an etching technique, probably sometime in the early 20th century. Look at the way Davies used the etching to create an image that's both there and not there. The woman is almost emerging from the ground itself, or dissolving back into it. Was he thinking about the weight of the body, or its lightness? It's like he's carving away at an idea, figuring out the form as he goes. You can feel the push and pull of his process, the adjustments he’s making in real-time. This reminds me of other printmakers, like Whistler or even Munch, who were also obsessed with capturing a mood, a feeling, more than a precise likeness. It's like they're all in this ongoing conversation about how to translate inner states into visual language. And that's what makes painting, and printmaking, so cool—it's an open-ended experiment, a way of seeing and feeling that's always up for grabs.