Hand-signed by the artist, with title, date, and edition number inscribed in ink on an archival label affixed to the reverse side of the mounted photograph.
A single pale wrist, lifted just clear of the black water, bent back behind the head: it is the smallest thing in the frame and it governs everything. From this high vantage the woman lies at the center of a wide dark cove at full tide, her red dress opened across the surface in a great fanned skirt, its sleeves darkened where the water has soaked them. Without that raised hand the scene would settle into a still life; with it, the body is caught between rising and going under.
Harvey builds the image on a single, daring chord of color: one saturated red set into a field of near-black water and olive-green weed. The eelgrass drifts in brown-green skeins across the top and around her shoulders; to the left, a run of silver reflections breaks the darkness into bright, restless facets. Concentric rings widen outward from the red mass, the only record that something living moved here. It is a lesson in restraint, a picture that spends its palette on one figure and lets the rest go quiet.
The elevated viewpoint gives the scene the hush of a devotional panel, a figure laid out among dark waters, and Harvey, working on the Maine coast where the tide does this twice a day, has trafficked in that charge between the ordinary and the sacramental, gathered in books such as Blue Violet and held in American collections. The archival pigment print carries these deep tones, holding detail in the near-blacks so the red never bleeds and the ripples keep their edges. The result is grave and precise at once.
A single pale wrist, lifted just clear of the black water, bent back behind the head: it is the smallest thing in the frame and it governs everything. From this high vantage the woman lies at the center of a wide dark cove at full tide, her red dress opened across the surface in a great fanned skirt, its sleeves darkened where the water has soaked them. Without that raised hand the scene would settle into a still life; with it, the body is caught between rising and going under.
Harvey builds the image on a single, daring chord of color: one saturated red set into a field of near-black water and olive-green weed. The eelgrass drifts in brown-green skeins across the top and around her shoulders; to the left, a run of silver reflections breaks the darkness into bright, restless facets. Concentric rings widen outward from the red mass, the only record that something living moved here. It is a lesson in restraint, a picture that spends its palette on one figure and lets the rest go quiet.
The elevated viewpoint gives the scene the hush of a devotional panel, a figure laid out among dark waters, and Harvey, working on the Maine coast where the tide does this twice a day, has trafficked in that charge between the ordinary and the sacramental, gathered in books such as Blue Violet and held in American collections. The archival pigment print carries these deep tones, holding detail in the near-blacks so the red never bleeds and the ripples keep their edges. The result is grave and precise at once.