Whiskers
Dox Thrash American
Published by WPA
Not on view
The glow that emanates from Whiskers, a portrait of an unidentified man, is characteristic of Thrash’s work in carborundum mezzotint, a technique he developed while working at the Philadelphia-based printshop of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project. The project was established by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal government to provide funding to unemployed artists during the Great Depression. Thrash adapted the mezzotint process, invented in the seventeenth century, by employing the industrial material of carborundum to abrade the metal plate. Working from dark to light, he burnished, or smoothed, the rough surface to form his composition, achieving an impressive tonal range of rich blacks.
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