E.122 Imagined head (The silent hour) 1999

• I. 1st state of 3

  

  Etching. The head of a strange, prehistoric-looking creature with an elephantine snout, and facing right, is portrayed against a cloudy sky.

  Impression on wove BFK Rives paper with watermark, printed by Rick Amor in his Alphington studio. Inscribed in pencil, below the plate mark: lower left: ‘1’; lower right: signed and dated ‘R. Amor 99’.

• II. 2nd state of 3

  The plate has been burnished in many places, to provide the subject with greater tonal differentiation. The sky has been lightened, especially around the creature’s outer contour. Its head and body have been selectively burnished, and the deep shadows around the top of the head and the right of the snout have been darkened with etching.

  Impression on wove BFK Rives paper with watermark, printed by Rick Amor in his Alphington studio. Inscribed in pencil, below the plate mark: lower left: ‘2’; lower right: signed and dated ‘R. Amor 99’.

• III. 3rd and final state (Featured Image)

  

  The outline of the creature’s back adjoining the clouds at the upper right has been burnished.

  Impression with light plate tone, on wove BFK Rives paper with watermark, printed by Rick Amor in his Alphington studio. Inscribed in pencil, below the plate mark: lower left: ‘3’; lower right: signed and dated ‘R. Amor 99’.

• No edition

• Comment

  Amor has described the weird, entirely imagined animal in this etching as being like something that might be found in a museum display case – an extinct creature from the prehistoric past. However, he has also likened the head, with its grotesque distortions, to some of Francis Bacon’s surreal inventions of the late 1940s.

  The motif found in E.122 first appeared in one of Amor’s sketchbook drawings and occurred subsequently in several of his paintings, notably The silent hour, 1999, where it is seen, in reverse orientation, in a large vitrine (Fry 2008). The silent hour was the artist’s source for the rendering of the imagined creature in the present etching, though in the print the museum context has been removed and the creature is depicted as a lapidified part of the landscape.

  The etching was largely resolved in the first state, but was submitted to tonal refinements in the two states that followed. Initially, Amor’s intaglio record books give the title of this work as Figure (The quiet hour), but the artist later decided to change the title to its present form.