A large color woodcut — and the most technically ambitious print in the collection. Where Hardcat (605) is a single-color black woodcut, this work uses multiple colors: a deep blue-teal ground, a brown-red figure form, green leaf/plant marks, and cream paper showing as white in the carved areas. This is a reduction woodcut or a multi-block print — a significantly more complex technical undertaking than a single-color work.
The composition is divided between two visual zones. On the left, a dense black area — a tree trunk or dark ground — from which green leaf and branch marks emerge, the forms carved with the characteristic V-gouge marks of woodcut. On the right, the blue-teal ground carries a large organic form in brown-red: a figure or body shape, heavily built, its contours described in flowing curves. The rounded form at center reads as both a head and a torso — ambiguous between figure and abstract biomorphic shape.
The wood grain is visible throughout the printed areas, most beautifully in the blue ground where it creates a subtle texture of parallel lines. This grain is not a flaw but a feature — woodcut's unique contribution to the image, the tree's own mark.
The rounded corners of the print — visible in the photograph — suggest the block itself had rounded corners, a compositional decision that gives the print a more contained, object-like quality than a rectangular print would have.
This print establishes Sidney as a serious printmaker, not just an occasional experimenter. The color registration, the multi-block technique, the scale — these are the work of someone who spent real time in a print studio.