Sacred Lotus of the East 1984

Here we have Jim Dine’s print, Sacred Lotus of the East. It’s difficult to know when it was made, but it’s a print – so an image made through process. Look at how Dine uses marks. The lotus has this great, shaggy head, made of lots of little lines, all pointing in slightly different directions. They really get the weight and heft of the flower. But the marks are also all very similar: they're straight, angular and dark. They don't describe a flower so much as they describe the idea of a flower. It's as if we are seeing the lotus refracted through a very particular state of mind. You might think of other graphic artists like Philip Guston, who also use repeated marks to conjure whole worlds of feeling, both delicate and forceful.