E.078 The whale 1993

• I. 1st state of 5

  Etching. The skeleton of a whale lies on a beach, at the water’s edge. The sky is filled with clouds. The composition is substantially complete. A small, irregular patch of foul biting appears in the white cloud at the right, just below the dark cloud. Foul biting is also evident in other clouds, at both the left and the right. There are three variant impressions of this state.

  1. 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: ‘The Whale’; lower right: signed and dated ‘Rick Amor 93’.
  2. Dark, selectively wiped impression with much plate tone, on wove BFK Rives paper, printed by Rick Amor in his Dunmoochin studio. Inscribed in pencil, below the plate mark: lower left: ‘2 [circled]’; lower centre: ‘The Whale’; lower right: signed and dated ‘Rick Amor 93’. Although inscribed ‘2’, this is an impression of the first state.
  3. Cleanly wiped 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: ‘The Whale’; lower right: signed and dated ‘Rick Amor 93’. Although inscribed ‘3’, this is an impression of the first state.

• I.a. 1st state of 5

  

  Etching. The skeleton of a whale lies on a beach, at the water’s edge. The sky is filled with clouds. The composition is substantially complete. A small, irregular patch of foul biting appears in the white cloud at the right, just below the dark cloud. Foul biting is also evident in other clouds, at both the left and the right. There are three variant impressions of this state.

• II. 2nd state of 5

  The patch of foul biting in the cloud at the centre right has been burnished away, and small areas of foul biting have been burnished from the clouds at the upper left.

  Impression on wove BFK Rives paper, printed by Rick Amor in his Dunmoochin studio. Inscribed in pencil, below the plate mark: lower left: ‘4 [circled]’; lower centre: ‘The Whale’; lower right: signed and dated ‘Rick Amor 93’. Although inscribed ‘4’, this is the second state.

• III. 3rd state of 5

  

  An area of horizontal parallel lines has been added to the clouds along the upper left edge; irregular loops of shading have been added throughout the cloud area, giving a greater sense of volume, tonal variety and movement. More etched shading has been added to the whale skeleton. Vertical lines have been added to the reflections in the water along the bottom edge.

  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: ‘5 [circled]’; lower centre: ‘The Whale’; lower right: signed and dated ‘Rick Amor 93’. Although inscribed ‘5’, this is the third state.

• IV. 4th state of 5

  A small area of foul biting in the clouds in the upper right corner has been burnished out. There are three variant impressions of this state.

  1. 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: ‘7 [circled]’; lower centre: ‘The Whale’; lower right: signed and dated ‘Rick Amor 93’. Although inscribed ‘7’, this is an impression of the fourth state.
  2. Dark, selectively wiped impression with much plate tone, on wove BFK Rives paper, printed by Rick Amor in his Dunmoochin studio. Inscribed in pencil, below the plate mark: lower left: ‘8 [circled]’; lower centre: ‘The Whale’; lower right: signed and dated ‘Rick Amor 93’. Although inscribed ‘8’, this is an impression of the fourth state.
  3. Cleanly wiped impression on wove BFK Rives paper, printed by Rick Amor in his Dunmoochin studio. Inscribed in pencil, below the plate mark: lower left: ‘9 [circled]’; lower centre: ‘The Whale’; lower right: signed and dated ‘Rick Amor 93’. Although inscribed ‘9’, this is an impression of the fourth state.

• IV.b. 4th state of 5

  

  A small area of foul biting in the clouds in the upper right corner has been burnished out. There are three variant impressions of this state.

• V. 5th and final state

  More etched modelling has been applied to the central area of the skeleton; the curved bone above has been selectively burnished.

  Impression with plate tone, on wove Arches paper, printed by Rick Amor in his Dunmoochin studio. Inscribed in pencil, below the plate mark: lower left: ‘Bon à tirer’; lower centre: ‘The whale’; lower right: signed and dated ‘Rick Amor 93’. This the fifth and final state is also a bon à tirer impression and forms part of the edition.

• V. 5th and final state (bon à tirer impression) (Featured Image)

  

  More etched modelling has been applied to the central area of the skeleton; the curved bone above has been selectively burnished.

• Edition, 1993

  Nominal edition of ten, but only five impressions were printed and numbered. The edition is variable. The impressions are on wove Arches paper and were printed by Rick Amor in his Dunmoochin studio. The edition included a bon à tirer impression (described under ‘V. 5th and final state’, above) and two artist’s proofs. Each impression is inscribed in pencil, below the plate mark: lower left: ‘[status of impression]’ [or] ‘[1 through 5]/10’; lower centre: ‘The Whale’; lower right: signed and dated ‘Rick Amor 93’.

  Edition sheet size: 290 x 380 mm

• Comment

  On 5 May 1992, the body of a 40 tonne, 18.7 metre blue whale, Balaenoptera musculus brevicauda, was found washed up on the beach at Cathedral Rock, near Lorne, on Victoria’s south-west coast. The whale’s bloated carcass was transported to the Werribee Sewage Treatment Complex, in Melbourne’s outer west, where a post-mortem was undertaken by a team of veterinary surgeons. The flesh was removed from the whale’s carcass, and the bones were later placed in the Werribee sewage ponds to macerate, that is, to be cleaned naturally by sewage bacteria. The articulated skeleton of the blue whale, a rare and threatened species, is now one of the treasures of Melbourne Museum, where it is on permanent display.

  On 17 May 1992, as part of Melbourne Water’s centenary celebrations, the Werribee treatment plant was opened to the public, who came in droves to see the remains of a remarkable creature. Among the crowd of six thousand who attended were Rick Amor and his friend the artist Mike Nicholls (b. 1960). Amor remembers the foul stench of the whale’s putrefying flesh, but he was able to withstand the smell and to paint on site a small oil of the carcass, and to take several photographs for reference. Some months later, in September 1992, he painted in his studio a variation of the subject of his small oil, shifting the setting from inland Werribee, bathed in the high colour of midday, to the coastal beach where the whale was found; the new composition included a bank of black clouds, lying low above the skeleton (Niagara Galleries 1993).

  The present etching follows the studio painting but is oriented in reverse direction. In making his print, as is always the case, Amor also adjusted the image to the slightly different format of the copper plate, showing the subject viewed from a greater distance and beneath a bigger sky. Throughout the process of creating E.078, the artist experimented in his wiping of the plate, printing impressions that vary widely in their tonal effects. This approach extended to the printing of the edition.

  When he made this etching, Amor was unaware of the engraved representations of beached whales made by artists working in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The appearance of a beached whale at certain times in earlier centuries was greeted as an omen of impending disaster. Although Amor’s whale is a skeleton and not the mammal itself, his etching may fruitfully be considered within the context of the history of representations of this animal. Having seen the remains of the whale and having painted what he saw, Amor then reimagined the creature and, as with the squid in works such as The sea (with giant squid), 1989 (cat. no. E.012), invested it with a sense of portent and menace.