E.066 Still life 1992

• I. 1st state of 6

  Etching. In a narrow alley lined with buildings hangs a white shirt, pegged by its sleeves to a washing line that has been strung between the buildings. At the end of the alley is the wall of another building, which has two windows visible. The main outlines of the composition have been lightly etched, with cross-hatching used for the darker areas.

  Impression on wove BFK Rives paper, printed by Rick Amor in his Dunmoochin studio. Inscribed in pencil, below the plate mark: lower left: ‘1 [circled]’; lower centre: ‘Still Life’; lower right: signed and dated ‘Rick Amor 92’.

• II. 2nd state of 6

  

  Etching has been added throughout to give the architecture and the hanging shirt greater definition.

  Impression on wove BFK Rives paper with watermark, printed by Rick Amor in his Dunmoochin studio. Inscribed in pencil, below the plate mark: lower left: ‘2 [circled]’; lower centre: ‘Still Life’; lower right: signed and dated ‘Rick Amor 92’.

• III. 3rd state of 6

  

  Drypoint has been added to give further clarity to the architectural details and to make the dark shadows even darker. Drypoint hatching has been added to the inside of the shirt and to the shirt’s shadow on the ground.

  Impression on wove BFK Rives paper, printed by Rick Amor in his Dunmoochin studio. Inscribed in pencil, below the plate mark: lower left: ‘3 [circled]’; lower centre: ‘Still Life’; lower right: signed and dated ‘Rick Amor ’92’.

• IV. 4th state of 6

  

  Much of the drypoint has been burnished away and replaced with work done with a rocker. Drypoint has also been burnished from the shirt and its shadow; the shirt collar has been outlined sharply with etched lines.

  Impression on wove paper, printed by Rick Amor in his Dunmoochin studio. Inscribed in pencil, below the plate mark: lower left: ‘4 [circled]’; lower centre: ‘Still Life’; lower right: signed and dated ‘Rick Amor ’92’. Printed with light surface tone within framing line.

• V. 5th state of 6

  The outer contour of the shirt has been defined more clearly with etching, as have the two pegs. There are four variant impressions of this state.

  1. Cleanly wiped impression on wove Moulin du Gué paper with watermark, printed by Rick Amor in his Dunmoochin studio. Inscribed in pencil, below the plate mark: lower left: ‘5 [circled]’; lower centre: ‘Still Life’; lower right: signed and dated ‘Rick Amor ’92’.
  2. Selectively wiped impression with much plate tone, on wove Moulin du Gué paper, printed by Rick Amor in his Dunmoochin studio. Inscribed in pencil, below the plate mark: lower left: ‘5 [circled]’; lower centre: ‘Still Life’; lower right: signed and dated ‘Rick Amor ’92’.
  3. Selectively wiped impression with plate tone, on wove paper, printed by Rick Amor in his Dunmoochin studio. Inscribed in pencil, below the plate mark: lower left: ‘6 [circled]’; lower centre: ‘Still Life’; lower right: signed and dated ‘Rick Amor ’92’. The plate tone is found especially at the top and along the right of the plate. Although inscribed ‘6’, this is an impression of the fifth state.
  4. Selectively wiped, but mottled, impression with plate tone, on wove BFK Rives paper with watermark, printed by Rick Amor in his Dunmoochin studio. Inscribed in pencil, below the plate mark: lower left: ‘7 [circled]’; lower centre: ‘Still Life’; lower right: signed and dated ‘Rick Amor ’92’. Although inscribed ‘7’, this is an impression of the fifth state.

• VI. 6th and final state

  Much new etched work appears throughout the plate. The wall at the end of the alley is now etched from top to bottom with vertical lines, and both windows have been darkened with etching. The jutting wall at the far centre right is now completely covered with hatching. The two light vertical strips that form part of the building at right have been covered with horizontal hatching. The ground is now covered by a mesh of hatching. The shirt’s contours and its details have been more clearly defined. A new horizontal line has been added along the bottom of the image area, below the original framing line. There are two variant impressions of this state.

  1. Impression with a slight film of plate tone, on wove paper, printed by Rick Amor in his Dunmoochin studio. Inscribed in pencil, below the plate mark: lower left: ‘AP I’; lower centre: ‘Still Life’; lower right: signed and dated ‘Rick Amor ’92’.
  2. More cleanly wiped impression on wove Arches paper with watermark, printed by Rick Amor in his Dunmoochin studio. Inscribed in pencil, below the plate mark: lower left: ‘AP II’; lower centre: ‘Still Life’; lower right: signed and dated ‘Rick Amor ’92’.

• Edition, 1992

  Variable edition of ten numbered impressions, on cream and white wove papers, printed in black ink by Rick Amor in his Dunmoochin studio. The edition included four artist’s proofs, in sepia ink (I/IV through IV/IV). Each impression is inscribed in pencil, below the plate mark: lower left: ‘[status of impression]’ [or] ‘[1 through 10]/10’; lower centre: ‘Still Life’; lower right: signed and dated ‘Rick Amor ’92’.

  Edition sheet size: 378 x 280 mm

  Amor also printed a unique proof (inscribed as such) whereby the plate was taken twice through the press, once in black ink, then in sepia ink; this impression was printed on wove Moulin du Gué paper with watermark.

• Edition impression, 1992 (Featured Image)

  

  Much new etched work appears throughout the plate. The wall at the end of the alley is now etched from top to bottom with vertical lines, and both windows have been darkened with etching. The jutting wall at the far centre right is now completely covered with hatching. The two light vertical strips that form part of the building at right have been covered with horizontal hatching. The ground is now covered by a mesh of hatching. The shirt’s contours and its details have been more clearly defined. A new horizontal line has been added along the bottom of the image area, below the original framing line.

• Comment

  This etching is based closely on a painting of the same title, made in July 1992 (Short 2008). The setting in both works is an alley off Little Bourke Street, near the Block Arcade, in Melbourne’s CBD, a location used in several of Amor’s pictures. A horizontal version of the subject had been painted in 1991 (Fry 2008).

  In his review of Amor’s 1995 exhibition at Niagara Galleries, Chris Wallace-Crabbe related the uneasy motif of the disembodied shirt upon a hanger, as it appeared in the painting The end of the arcade, 1995, to a refrain in W. B. Yeats’s poem ‘The Apparitions’ (1938): ‘Fifteen apparitions have I seen; / The worst a coat upon a coat-hanger’ (Wallace-Crabbe 1995).

  David Hansen, in his 2008 essay ‘Vacant Possession’, elaborated on this interpretation, tracing back the origins of the shirt motif in Amor’s work to the late 1960s, and drawing a parallel between the shirt and T. S. Eliot’s ‘hollow men’:

  Amor presents the disembodied shirt as a sign of the absent soul. From its first appearance in a 1969 drawing, through the Pelaco-packet foldings of his public servant pictures of the early 1970s, to the alleyway clothesline shirt-as-Rembrandt’s-Side of Beef in Still Life (1992) … Amor’s repeated ghost-garment functions as a sign of the ‘hollow man’, of moral or spiritual vacancy, and as a metaphor of mortality. (Hansen in Short 2008, p. 106)

  Amor’s etching, while close to its painted model, characteristically diverges from it in some of its details, notably in the positioning of the shirt closer to the foreground, as well as in the prominence given to the ribbed left wall. Nevertheless, in taking the etching through its six states, Amor systematically followed the tonal resolution of the painting. He also experimented with plate tone, ink colour, and paper colours. His experiments were not simply pictorial in nature; his chief interest lay in the creation and the shaping of mood, atmosphere and emotional content.