Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Terry Adkins
American; 20th-century, 21st-century
Normal, IL: University Galleries of Illinois State University
63%
What Reason Could I Give? Etching. 1976
One of Adkins' rare student works from his time at Illinois State. Many of the ideas derive from the work of John Dowell — a stated influence though never an instructor — namely its little bits of scrawled text, its representation of an enigmatic machine-like structure, and its deployment of both distinct shaded forms against the black and indistinct, vanishing touches of white that appear to float just behind the picture plane. As with Dowell, Adkins is at his worst in these early works when his lines are at their most illustrative. (Compare, for instance, the well-defined hook-thing in the top left corner with the inverted triangular vertical wisp at right.) Also as with Dowell, Adkins succeeds when he gives the black ground of his prints' pictorial components enough free space to emptily assert itself as literal surface (or as synonymous with surface). Here, this happens in that consuming chunk of nothing that goes from the print's left edge to the fan-like object almost all the way to the right. Additionally, whether it was a deliberate effect or an accident of the intaglio process, the speckled, starry aspect of the whole image complexifies the black. In Dowell's work, on the other hand, there's typically a cleanness to his registration — a finish to his surfaces — that can feel schematic. (2025)