A scratchboard self-portrait — the second of the three known self-portraits — executed on scratchboard, a medium in which the artist applies black ink to a white clay-coated board and then scratches through the black to reveal white marks below. The technique produces the tonal opposite of drawing: instead of adding dark marks to light paper, the artist removes dark to reveal light. The face fills the composition in three-quarter view: the eyes wide and direct, the nose broad, the lips full with the lower teeth visible in a slight parting. The short curly hair is described with a dense field of looping marks — each loop a scratched-out white curl against the black ground. A striped collar is visible at the neck.
The striped collar is the same distinctive element that appears in the watercolor self-portrait (Work 1584) — teal and pink stripes running around the neck. The appearance of this same collar in both self-portraits confirms that they depict the same person at approximately the same period: Sidney T. Cothran Jr. in his own clothing, at the time both works were made. The Pittsburgh College notation in the CSV places this work in an institutional educational context, likely a studio art course requirement, providing a biographical anchor point connecting Sidney to Pittsburgh in his student years.
The scratchboard technique requires a different kind of thinking from additive mark-making: the artist must pre-visualize the light zones and scratch them out, the dark ground remaining where the face recedes into shadow. The face emerges from darkness rather than from light — the shadows are given (the black ground), and the artist's marks are the light. This reversal connects to the tradition of mezzotint and other reductive printmaking processes, and to the collection's most tonal drawings (the charcoal works on ochre). Here the technique is pushed to its extreme: the face as a discovery rather than a construction, the portrait as excavation.