In this work, Jonas Wood grows a plant out of a Greek vase. Both are subjects that run through his still lifes. The vase goes back to a visit Wood made to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2007, when he began drawing in the galleries with a ballpoint pen on hotel stationery, mostly Greek vases but also Oceanic and African objects. Back in the studio he redrew the small pen sketches in charcoal or pencil. Sixteen of the vase drawings appeared in 2010 in A History of The Met: Volume I, an artist’s book Wood published himself with Anton Kern Gallery. Drawing the same objects again and again reduced them to a shorthand of clear outlines and bold pattern that he could carry into his own pictures. The monoprints he made that same year brought this habit of repeated drawing into printmaking.

In this sheet a large pot holds a plant whose broad leaves overlap as they rise, drawn in black and graded grays. Ornament crowds the surface of the pot: stylized horses, spirals, circular emblems and sharp borders of the kind that band ancient pottery. Wood sets aside conventional perspective. Plant and pot share one shallow space, and the leaves sit on the paper as flat shapes, much as the painted horses sit on the pot. With so little color, the white of the sheet does as much work as the ink. Ornament and leaf are drawn in the same language, and Wood gives neither more weight.

The sheet is the seventh in a series of fifteen unique monoprints that Wood made at Cirrus Editions in Los Angeles in 2010. It was his second project there. His first, with Jean Milant, who founded Cirrus in 1970, had produced three editions the year before. For the monoprints, the lithographic plate was painted, printed once and reworked for the next impression, so each impression carried traces of the one before. The fifteen share a structure, and no two are the same.

The subject of the print offers a precedent for its method. Greek vases were thrown to standard shapes and decorated within shared conventions. Even so, scholars since John Beazley have assigned thousands of Athenian vases to individual painters, most of them anonymous, by the way each drew an eye or an ankle. Wood’s monoprints work on similar terms. The pot and its motifs stay fixed, and one hand varies them from sheet to sheet. In this sheet that hand shows in the brushstrokes inside the dark leaves and in the uneven density of the ornament.

The monoprints were first shown at Cirrus Gallery in Jonas Wood: Prints (2010–11), and this sheet was exhibited again in the gallery’s Unique and Singular in 2017. The decorated pot would remain central to Wood’s work, and it had a second source closer to home. Wood is married to the ceramicist Shio Kusaka, and he has drawn and painted her porcelain vessels many times, with close attention to their silhouettes, open mouths and shifting decoration. The two first exhibited together in 2013, in Still Life with Pots. The pot returns in later prints as well, among them the Matisse Pot screenprints of 2017–18. Among his prints, the 2010 monoprints stay closest to the ballpoint sketches made in the Met’s galleries three years earlier.