Vintage Delmar V. Forbis Artichoke, Signed Work on Paper, 1968

The Piece

A single artichoke, drawn straight on and filling the sheet, its bracts overlapping in tiers and curling back at the tips into small hooks. The linework is fine and dark green-black, laid in close parallel strokes along the inner edge of each bract so the form turns and the head reads as round. Behind the line sits an olive tone filling the bracts, which is what gives the whole thing its weight.

The design is better than the subject has any right to be. The bracts are stylised almost to the point of flame, the base twists into a knot of leaves that reads as a root, and the whole silhouette comes to a point at top and bottom so it sits on the paper like a heraldic device rather than a vegetable.

A fine rectangular line runs around the image. Beneath it, in the artist's own pencil, the sheet is inscribed Experiment I at the left and Delmar V. Forbis 11/68 at the right.

It is presented in a painted cream frame with gilt fillets, over an ochre mat with a dark inner line, cut to an octagonal window.

History & Provenance

The inscription is the whole provenance and it is worth reading carefully. On a work on paper the title is conventionally written at the left of the sheet and the signature at the right, which is exactly the arrangement here: Experiment I at left, the signature and 11/68 at right. In the signature position, that reads as a date, November 1968. It could alternatively be an edition fraction, impression eleven of sixty-eight, but edition numbers conventionally occupy the left position that the title already holds here, and a work called Experiment I suggests a trial rather than a formal numbered edition.

Either way the pencil is the artist's. Whatever the medium turns out to be, this is an original signed work rather than a reproduction, and the inscription sits on the paper in graphite rather than being printed into the image, which means the artist held this particular sheet.

No published record for Delmar V. Forbis appears in the auction databases or artist indexes. That is not a defect and it is not unusual. A great deal of good American work on paper from the nineteen-sixties came out of university studios and regional workshops, was signed, titled and given away or sold locally, and never reached a gallery that reported to a price database. The work is what it is regardless of whether a database has heard of it, and an unrecorded artist is the ordinary condition of the field rather than a warning sign.

The medium is not settled and this listing does not pretend otherwise. Read from photographs the image suggested an intaglio print, on the strength of the rectangular line around the image and the close parallel hatching. Examined in person the surface reads instead as drawing, coloured pencil or pastel worked directly on the sheet. What decides it is physical rather than visual: an intaglio plate mark is a bevelled impression pressed into the paper and can be felt, and printed ink stands slightly proud of the surface, while pencil and pastel sink into the tooth of the sheet and vary in density along a stroke. The work is offered as a signed original work on paper and no specific medium is claimed. If it is drawing, it is a unique work rather than one impression among several.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

An artichoke is one of the few vegetables built like architecture, and drawn this way it stops being food. The tiers of bracts read as scales, or feathers, or flame, and at a glance across a room the thing could as easily be a pine cone, a lotus or a crest on a shield. That ambiguity is why it holds a wall.

The colour does the rest. Olive green on toned cream paper, in a cream frame, is a quiet palette that goes almost anywhere, and it is particularly good in a kitchen or a dining room where the subject earns its place twice over. Hang it alone where the pencil inscription can be seen, or put it in a group of botanical works where it will be the one people look at longest.