Field Notes (1992) is a portfolio of twenty-five etchings by Terry Winters, born of the second collaboration between the artist and master printer Aldo Crommelynck. Field Notes utilizes nearly every method of intaglio printmaking. Crommelynck, a world-renowned printmaker who collaborated with Pablo Picasso for twenty years, was able to create the subtle tonalities and inky black fields in these etchings with aquatint, using the open-bite, spitbite and sugarlift methods. In addition, these etchings are directly related to, and were created alongside, works that the artist exhibited in his mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 1991. Field Notes is in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The New York Public Library, The Detroit Institute of Art and The Tate.
This year also marks the 20th Anniversary of Terry Winters: Printed Works at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Nan Rosenthal wrote in the catalog for that exhibition that Winters’ pursuit was “to propose visually, through his essentially abstract art, how the world at present is linked in ways we cannot always visualize but constantly experience.” Winter’s Field Notes portfolio exemplifies that proposition, showing us a natural world in abstraction.
The Field Notes portfolio is currently on view at 521 West 26th Street, 3rd Floor, in a dedicated project room alongside Portfolio: a larger exhibition dedicated to works created in portfolios.