Seventeenth-Century Poet 1965

Leonard Baskin etched this Seventeenth-Century Poet, and what’s so cool is the way the image emerges so subtly. You can almost feel Baskin coaxing the figure into being. The darks around the face give the poet a brooding intensity, don't you think? I’m imagining Baskin hunched over the plate, his hand moving with a kind of controlled frenzy, pushing the acid to bite into the metal, line by line. The whole image feels haunted, like a half-remembered dream, or a ghost conjured up from the pages of a dusty old book. It makes me think about other artists, like Goya, who used etching to explore the darker sides of the human condition. I think artists like Baskin are forever in conversation with those who came before, riffing on themes of mortality, beauty, and the sheer strangeness of being alive. It leaves space for interpretation, a sense of mystery, which is what makes art so endlessly fascinating.