In the summer of 1943, Taos artist Howard Cook (1901–1980) traveled to the South Pacific to serve as a correspondent in the U.S. Army’s short-lived War Art Unit. During his assignment, Cook produced hundreds of sketches documenting the daily lives of Allied soldiers working there; yet, one group stands out for its subject matter: the artist himself. Collectively titled Self-Portrait in a Foxhole, these works depict Cook taking shelter during an air raid and, together with his writings, offer an invaluable perspective into his interpretation of war through art. This essay explores Cook’s wartime oeuvre by examining the Self-Portrait group’s depiction of vulnerability. Through an expressionistic use of ink and paint and a compositional emphasis on his passivity, Cook offers a personalized interpretation of combat conditions that underscores his sense of exposure. Although his self-representation initially appears distinct from the more assertive soldiers in his other sketches, when viewed together, they collectively demonstrate Cook’s efforts to record a nuanced impression of the war, reflecting a broader tradition of exploring war’s deleterious effects on soldiers. More broadly, Cook’s oeuvre highlights the significance of the War Art Unit and the potential for more scholarship on this initiative.

Through the narrative threads of language, Ekphrasis considers an intimate relationship between site and practice. Navigating both the tracks and pathways of local parkland, and the contours of lines drawn on stone, the text dwells on the analogous acts of inscription in which these worlds converge. Moving between the woodland environment and the lithography studio these territories offer sites of speculation in which the transcriptions of language are born. Glimpsed in this process is an interplay between systems and substrates that simultaneously progress these unfolding lines, whilst resisting and constraining the routes they take. Spilling out from the overflow of these events is the excess of ornament.

Written alongside the making of a series of lithographs, closely observed are the places and events that shaped their materialisation. After twelve years the woodland I live next to has become embedded in my work, depicted in the hand coloured images is aging bark gathered from felled and rotting trees. Also visually hinted at are nineteenth century atlases and anatomical illustrations. The work more specifically references Ogham – a Celtic alphabet named after trees. What remains of this early script is preserved on stones and in manuscripts, no longer surviving are inscriptions carved into wood.

Like many of his contemporaries, N.C. Wyeth executed commissions for popular print illustrations of historical Native life. This essay closely examines Wyeth’s work for Fenimore Cooper’s novel, The Last of the Mohicans, done in 1919. By putting Wyeth’s original paintings in dialogue with both their future print processes and collections of Native material culture, this essay considers how print media played a role in authenticating a generalized Native culture for American audiences, far removed from the material and social realities of Native communities.

The eighteenth-century Antwerp artist Antoine Overlaet, by profession a ‘broodbakker’, was also a meticulous and skilled draughtsman who specialised in copies of prints, primarily by seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish artists, notably by Rembrandt (1606-1669) and after Rubens (1577-1640) and Teniers (1610-1690).1 In addition, he made careful copies of Wenceslaus Hollar (1607-1677) and some French artists including Jacques Callot (1592-1635) and Claude Mellan (1598-1688). Overlaet sought to mimic to an uncanny extent in pen and brown ink the distinct qualities of the techniques of drypoint, etching and engraving.