screenprinting

screenprinting. A printing technique based on stencilling, originally used for commercial work but popular with artists for creative printmaking since the 1960s. The essence of the technique is that a fine mesh screen, stretched tightly over a wooden frame, is placed above a sheet of paper and colour is forced through the mesh with a rubber blade called a squeegee. Usually the screen is made of silk—hence the term silkscreen printing, which is often used in the USA; however, as the screen can also be made of cotton, nylon, or metal, the more inclusive term is useful. Some exponents prefer instead to use the term serigraphy (from sericum, Latin for silk) to distinguish artistic printmaking from purely commercial applications. There are various ways of applying the design to the screen. The earliest and most basic was to attach a cut-out stencil to it; this is an improvement on the simple stencil where, for example, a letter O required connecting pieces to prevent the centre falling out—a problem that does not arise when the stencil is supported by the mesh. A refinement of this method is to paint the design directly on the screen with a glue- or varnish-like substance that blocks the holes in the mesh. The blocked-out areas form the negative part of the design, the colour being squeezed through the untouched parts of the screen. However, more sophisticated methods enable the artist to create a positive design directly on the screen with a waxy or waterproof medium that is eventually dissolved to allow the ink through only in the parts that have been so treated. Photographic images can be used in the design by shining a light through a transparency onto a chemically treated mesh. Screenprints are almost invariably coloured, a different screen generally being used successively for each colour.

The origins of screenprinting are murky, but the technique seems to have come to Europe from Japan in the late 19th century. It was soon adopted for advertising purposes, and photographic images were first used in the medium in about 1916. Rowland Hilder is said to have produced a screenprint in Britain as early as 1924, but the technique was evidently first seriously used for original printmaking by American artists in the 1930s, when its cheapness was probably an important factor during the Depression years. Ben Shahn was an exponent at this time, and Jackson Pollock made a few screenprints in the early 1950s, but it was not until the early 1960s that the medium made an important impact in the art world. It was especially favoured by Pop artists, whose bold images were well served by its capacity for strong, flat colour and its relative crudeness of detail (subtle handling is discouraged because of the texture of the mesh). Moreover, for artists who took their imagery from the world of popular culture, it was particularly appropriate to use a medium with such strong commercial associations and one that could incorporate ready-made cultural references in the form of photographs. The artist who more than any other put screenprinting on the map was Andy Warhol, whose background in advertising gave him an affinity with the technique. Other leading American artists of the time who took up screenprinting include Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg. Both Warhol and Rauschenberg extended the technique by screenprinting a design onto a canvas to serve as the basis of a painting.

In Britain screenprinting took off as a creative medium at very much the same time as in the USA. The Institute of Contemporary Arts launched a project to commission screenprints from leading artists in 1962 and it proved a great success, Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi being among those whose imaginations were fired by the medium. Subsequently artists of many different styles and outlooks have used screenprinting. Among the most remarkable prints—and certainly the most technically complex—are those of the American Superrealist Richard Estes, who has sometimes used as many as 80 screens in one work. He writes: ‘It seemed to me that silkscreen was very clean—sharp lines and opaque inks. I could work in layers which is more or less the way I paint … You can get it perfect—you don't ever have to worry about a color or tone until you print it. Just mix the color you want and put it on. It's limiting in the sense that the line is cut out so it's pretty hard and sharp. That seems to fit pretty well with most of what I'm doing with the paintings—the sharpness of the line.’