I’m not sure where this is. Wish we had some of those stones to work on in our studio!
Old litho blocks. The coolest thing in the new REI in the puck bldg.
For those of you in my Print Culture class this spring, we are planning to take a field trip to Tamarind.
The Art Of Time (by Martina Chamrad)
”The Art of Time” is a documentary about Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Inc, founded in Los Angeles in 1960 by the late June Wayne (1918-1911) to prevent the demise of lithography. “The Art of Time” was directed by Marina Chamrad.
After watching “The Art of Time”, I’m really itching to do some printmaking again after too many years away from it…
Trade card of James Pain, pyrotechnist 4228
Lithograph, coloured, 1884
From the Evanion Collection, Online Exhibition, the British Library
London-born Henry Evans, or ‘Evanion’ as he styled himself on stage, enjoyed a long and reasonably successful career as a conjurer, ventriloquist and humorist…Evanion took advantage of this theatrical background to amass a large and fascinating collection of printed ephemera… The British Library now owns some 5,000 items from his collection, originally purchased by the British Museum in 1895.
The Evanion collection is both interesting and exceptional in the variety of its items and in the many aspects of English Victorian life they illuminate. It’s a rare and significant collection largely because such material was not considered of any lasting value in its own day, and so was neither preserved nor collected. Despite this, the collection includes many examples of fine printing, often extremely attractive and of merit in their own right.
Arc Welder, Bryant Pringle, c. 1934/1943, lithograph printed in black on wove paper, image: 12½ x 9½ in.; sheet: 15 3/8 x 12½ in. Gift of the Works Progress Administration, Federal Art Project
Government Support for the Arts: WPA Prints from the 1930’s, Nov 27, 2009 to March 21, 2010 at the Detroit Institute of Art, MI.
This show at the DIA gathered together around 100 prints produced under the WPA program during the Great Depression. What surprised me most was the diversity of artists supported by the grants, including a large number of women and minorities. The WPA projects gave these artists the support they needed to make important advances in refining printmaking technology (most notably experimentation with screen print) and to voice social commentary.
…artists were recognized as a special group of laborers in need of financial assistance. More than 5,000 artists created hundreds of thousands of artworks, the majority of them prints. Printmaking centers were established across the country… Artists of all ethnic backgrounds were accepted
Images of the lithography studio at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, China, where I was working this year.
The studio has six presses, two walls of sinks and three areas for inking. Two of the presses are made by the New Mexican company, Tackach, and are larger than the biggest tables in the room. Each student gets their own personal space to work, a space to store materials, and a drawer in a flat file. Stones are “checked out” like library books from the printmaking store downstairs. The studio has large windows and opens onto a large courtyard shared by the other printmaking studios.
The only thing lacking (which is a major health issue) is proper ventilation. Students often close the windows and smoke while handling flammable, toxic or corrosive materials like turpentine and acid. Luckily, there are usually only a handful of students using the studio at any given time.
Senefelder was the first to try and make imitation stones as early as 1814…. white lead, lime, and caseine…His invention came to be known as paper stone…Knecht, Senefelder’s nephew, made a more resistant imitation stone using the following ingredients and proportions:
chalk………………3 parts
silver white………1 part
linseed oil…………1 part
lime………………..1 part
iron oxyde………..1/8 of a part
It was said that this “stone” could handle some six hundred impressions.
—A technical dictionary of printmaking, André Béguin.
There is a worry I have heard expressed in the litho studios here in China:
If all the litho stones in the world come from one quarry somewhere in Germany and that quarry is closed now, then every time a stone breaks the lithographs get smaller and smaller. Soon there will be no stones. One artist asked, “well couldn’t we discover stone in China? Has anyone ever looked?”
Apparently there have been multiple sources of litho stone, but not all sources were of equal quality. Another issue is that stone lithography is no longer commercial and therefore re-opening quarries or exploring new sources is not economically feasible.
litho quarries in Europe:
Towards 1920 the Solenhofen quarry began to show signs of depletion but the crisis of lithography saved it from being exhausted.
—A technical dictionary of printmaking, André Béguin.
For many years, the Solnhofen deposits were the only source of lithographic limestone. French lithographic limestone from quarries near Montdardier, about 6 km south of le Vigan, Gard was exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851…The largest lithographic printing stone ever quarried came from Le Vigan, 230x150cm (90x59 in).
Le Vigan Region, Gard, Montdardier. A quarry for lithographic stones d’Avèze. This image was taken around 1910.
The American Lithographic Stone Company was organized in Louisville, Kentucky in late 1868. It initially focused its operation on quarries in Overton County, Tennessee,[13] but shortly before 1900, it opened a quarry at Brandenburg, Kentucky. This quarry was the only commercial source of lithographic stone in the United States at the turn of the 20th century. Unlike the Solnhofen stone, Kentucky lithographic limestone was slightly dolomitic, and it was judged to be competitive with Solnhofen stone for some purposes, but not for the highest quality work.[14][15]
—Lithographic Limestone, Wikipedia
One quarry in the US was found to have stone of similar quality to the Solnhofen stone:
Gable Quarry, southwest of Osage, Mitchell County, Iowa. “XX” Beds of fine grained lithographic stone. Color plates from the Iowa Geological Survey 1903 Annual Report were printed on stone from Mitchell County.
At the turn of the 20th century, a town in north-central Iowa was founded because of this interest in high-quality lithographic stone…The quarries operated for only a short period, however, and the town failed to prosper as metal engraving replaced lithographic stone in providing good quality printing at lower cost.In 1968, a representative of Tamarind Workshop visited Iowa to evaluate the potential of using stone from Lithograph City. Preliminary results indicated that its quality compared very well with Solnhofen stone…In the course of their studies, however, it was discovered that white onyx could be used as a substitute. —Bill J. Bunkee (Adapted from Iowa Geology 1991, No. 16, Iowa Department of Natural Resources)
Focus XV A, Lin Tianmiao, Lithograph and screenprint with embossing, 2006
Much of Lin Tianmiao’s work is in sculpture and installation, often using thread and techniques of embroidering and embossing. These lithographs on handmade paper were completed while she was at a residency at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute in 2006.
“Lin Tianmiao was born in Taiyuan Shanxi Province, China in 1961. She studied Fine Art at Capital Normal University in Beijing, and then at the Art Student’s League in New York. For nearly a decade she and her husband, artist Wang Gongxin, lived in New York City, where she designed textiles until the couple moved back to Beijing in 1994.”
-Mary Ryan Gallery, New York
Perhaps one of the most challenging problems of lithography is that it is a chemical process involving the use of oil and water which means that everything, from how humid it is outside to how well you wring out a sponge can alter the final outcome. It is also highly labor intensive, requiring hours of grinding a stone with sand and a piece of glass. In an interview with the art critic and historian PiLi, Lin Tianmiao describes the process she values in art. While much of her work is three-dimensional, her words speak eloquently to labor intensive manual processes like lithography.
“Handwork has a randomness while the mechanical work only has accuracy, without that unexpected randomness. The randomness of handwork can fall within the control of man and can be added, reduced, maneuvered and used at any time.” — Lin Tianmiao, www.lintianmiao.com
Reflection on seeing Lin Tianmiao’s work at the Long March Space in Beijing, 2008:
My current method of drawing began when I walked into Long March Space and saw Lin Tianmiao’s two series of low contrast monochromatic prints that use a combination of lithography, screen print, embossing and sewing on handmade paper. The two bodies of work, entitled Focus and Seeing Shadows, both play with the relation between surface and depth in the prints. The lithographs of blurred faces or dilapidated houses only come into focus at a distance while the embossing and inclusions in the paper can only be seen when the viewer stands an inch or two away from the paper. The low contrast monochromatic palate, combined with the haziness and scale of the prints puts the images just on the edge of visibility. I found myself repeatedly backing away from the prints and then walking up close to them again. The low contrast invited me to notice much smaller variations in tonality and further highlighted the details of the paper itself, which had needle-shaped forms, threads and spheres embedded in the paper. The lack of contrast, coupled with the diffused nature of the image and the need to see the detail up close meant that there was no position in the room at which the entire drawing clicked into focus. The only way to experience the drawing was by moving in front of it, by walking a distance on the floor in a way that resulted in the visual reading of the image fluctuating between atmospheric depth and surface detail.
For me this was a pivotal moment in the development of my work. I felt pressure to use video or installation to create an interactive experience for my viewer. Much of this stemmed from an institutional categorization of video art and installation as contemporary and drawing and printmaking as traditional. Working in the Chinese contemporary art scene for a summer, where most work is two-dimensional, I realized how erroneous this categorization was. However, it was not until I saw Tianmiao’s prints that I realized that her prints were not only equally capable of being contemporary but could actively engage with the viewers in ways that were distinct from but no less important than those used by time based media. Lin Tianmiao’s prints could not be taken in from a single vantage point. To appreciate the fine detail on the surface of the paper and also see the large blurred image printed on the paper the viewer had to walk up close to the painting and back away from it. For the viewer to have this experience the work had to be two-dimensional and static. It was the stillness of the image that allowed this fluctuation between surface and depth to occur and demanded a certain level of contemplation and engagement from the viewer.
for more information about the series and the artist:
www.lintianmiao.com artist’s website in English and Chinese, also includes interviews and articles on the artist.
Singapore Tyler Print Institute, “Introduction,” Lin Tianmiao: Focus on Paper (Singapore: Singapore Tyler Print Institute, 2007). “collaboration between Lin Tianmiao and the Singapore Tyler Print Institute (STP) from her four week residency as a Visiting Artist, which culminated in the Focus and Seeing Shadows series.”
Victoria Lu, “Reflection of a Goddess: Looking at Lin Tianmiao’s Print Series,” Lin Tianmiao: Focus on Paper (Singapore: Singapore Tyler Print Institute, 2007)
(via Google Books)
Moreover, the fact that Chinese publishers made the transition from xylography to lithography and then letterpress in a generation and a half, rather than the four centuries needed to achieve printing modernity in the west, suggests that there were high social costs… with regard to European printing industries, early use and ownership of machinery by printers created working conditions that significantly polarized social relations.
—pg 133
When letterpress printing arrived in Shanghai in the 1870’s and 1880’s, each technology was influenced by largely non-commercial, philanthropic sectarian affiliation…. However, the next phase in Western-style printing in China would not be noticeably Western…but a Chinese, secular and industrial one.
—pg 29
Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876-1937
AuthorChristopher A. ReedPublisherUBC Press, 2005ISBN0774810416, 9780774810418Length391 pages
Try “making” a print online! This is my favorite explanation of printmaking. Moma’s interactive flash animation of different printmaking techniques:woodcut, lithography, etching and screen print. One of the clearest and quickest ways to get a basic sense of how each process works.
steps in the lithographic process (abbreviated)
Making a colored lithograph is, as Robert Hughes put it, like ‘learning to play ping pong backwards in a mirror with a time lapse’–Susan Tallman, 107
Tallman, Susan. “Socks, Politics and Prints,” Tamarind: Forty Years. ed Marjorie Devon. Tamarind Institute, 2000.
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