A collection of freshly harvested wild mushrooms sit in an enticing jumble, their gilled undersides and pebbled caps the focal point of the composition with no other textures to distract the viewer. Van Hoesen’s eye for coaxing the life of small objects onto the paper, using the least amount of visual noise, is highlighted in this piece, and she renders the mushrooms as elegantly in their tidy sprawl as a nosegay in a vase.
”Mushrooms” was printed in two editions, the first an edition of 25, printed by Kathan Brown and Jeryl Parker, the second an edition of 35, printed in 1970 by Liz Trout. The catalogue raisonne lists only a single proof for the third state, this is the second proof from that state, printed by the artist.