Screenprinting is easy and my kind of slightly crude; it was the first printing process I used on my hand-laid papers in Greensboro in 1977-78. The last screenprint I did was in 1983, when GG and I screened an image for some anti-war group she was part of. Now I have screenprinted a souvenir to hand out at the Black Mountain College conference in Asheville. The theme of the conference is craft, and my image is a detail from Anni Albers’ fabric artwork entitled Red Meander. Her work,in turn, is based on an ancient motif that appears on early pottery around the world.
after Red Meander by Anni Albers. silkscreen on hand-laid paper.
To make this, I blew up the original image (from the book Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay, by Christopher Benfey) until the lines were about an inch thick. then I darkened the dark areas and taped the image to the underside of a silkscreen. I cut roughly one inch strips of masking tape and filled in the dark areas I saw through the screen with lines of the tape. All this flipped and reversed the areas of print, but with the meander, that doesn’t really matter!
I picked up some red screen printing ink at Askew-Taylor’s and added a little aquamarine and yellow to get the brick red I wanted. I had whipped out 50 extra sheets of our hand-laid 6×9 card stock over the weekend. Laying the sheet on a registered spot (with a new scrap larger sheet under each lay), I then set the corners of the silkscreen on register corners and lay it on the paper. Spooning a generous dose of ink along the top line, I pulled my blade tool over the screen, running the print (which was slightly larger than my sheet) to the edge of the paper. Lift, separate, and lay to dry. There is a letterpress credit on back done with our small brass stamper.
I look forward to more screen printing as my new schedule allows for some projects like this one. And three cheers for Black Mountain College and the amazing presence it continues to have in the arts of our land!
The Bibliophile- book arts & bibliomania 