A single white trumpet hangs from a woody branch, wide open, petals curling back at the tips like something caught mid-exhale. Above it, dark leaves press in — heavy, waxy, almost too green. To the left, a long seed pod dangles on its own stem, pale green fading to yellow at the tendrils, the part of the plant that nobody paints because it isn't pretty. Del Swan painted it anyway.

This is Datura — angel's trumpet, jimsonweed, devil's snare, moonflower, toloache. It has more names than almost any plant in the Americas because every culture that encountered it had something to say about it. The Chumash used the root in ceremonies for three thousand years. Georgia O'Keeffe painted the flower over and over in New Mexico. Every part of it is poisonous. The flowers open at dusk and fill the night air with a fragrance that draws hawk moths from a hundred yards away. By morning they've already begun to close.

Swan cut this image into a woodblock and printed it by hand in 1965, then colored it — the green of the leaves, the brown of the branch, the pale wash of the trumpet, the faint blue shadow inside the bloom. The edition was just twenty impressions. A red chop mark sits in the lower right corner in the Japanese tradition, and the print is titled and signed in pencil along the bottom margin. The whole approach — flat areas of color, bold carved outlines, hand-coloring, the seal — comes straight from the Japanese woodblock tradition that flourished in San Francisco in the 1960s, centered around galleries like Kabutoya on Sutter Street, a Japanese art space with roots in Ginza, Tokyo.

This is Datura — angel's trumpet, jimsonweed, devil's snare, moonflower, toloache.

Framed simply in a black metal frame with white mat. The paper has the warm tone of sixty years, and the colors are still strong.