Lithography

What is it?

A printing process that uses a flat stone or metal plate on which the image areas are worked using a greasy substance so that the ink will adhere to them by, while the non-image areas are made ink-repellent.

 

Frank Stella

All of Stella's early prints were based on stripe paintings - conceived as so-called 'album' prints which were supposed to be assembled in binders to provide an intimate record of his early work. The Black Series II was based on the complete series of diamond-pattern Black Paintings that Stella created in 1959-60, including Gavotte of 1959 which was destroyed by the artist in 1961. The related print and sketches provide the only surviving record of the work. The prints are not illustrations of the paintings but differ significantly in detail and character. While the application of the ink with a lithographic marker recreates the free-hand quality of the paintings, the stripes in the prints are generally more clearly defined resulting in a more intensely optical diamond-pattern. Stella further changed the striped pattern and number of black bands in order to avoid the prints becoming miniature reproductions of the paintings. The images are situated off-centre, in the bottom left-hand corner of the sheets. Stella thus prevented the geometric figures assuming the object-like quality of the paintings displayed on white walls, instead 'allowing the unpainted areas between the stripes to be identified with the paper,' thus countering 'traditional figure-ground relationships' and introducing 'an element of tension as the eye moves to correct the asymmetry'