the.com/silkscreen
a stencil with a hangover that built punk gig posters and Warhol's empire alike
means A printing technique in which ink is forced through a fine mesh screen onto a surface, with a stencil blocking the areas you don't want printed — used for posters, fabric, and art prints.
from A plain compound of "silk" and "screen." The screen was the working part: a frame stretched with fine mesh, originally woven of silk, through which ink was squeezed. The method grew out of much older stencil printing — the technique has roots in East Asian stenciling traditions — but the silk-mesh version took shape in the early 20th century in the West, where it was also called serigraphy (from Latin "sericum," silk, plus Greek "graphein," to write). Modern screens are usually polyester now, but the silk name stuck.
- origin
- perfected in China over a thousand years ago
- silk's exit
- modern screens use polyester, not actual silk
- warhol's weapon
- his Marilyns were screenprinted, not painted
- circuit boards
- electronics get printed this way too
- mesh count
- finer mesh means crisper, more detailed prints
andy warhol campbell's soup — iconic 1962 silkscreen series of 32 canvases each depicting a different soup flavor
marilyn diptych — warhol's 1962 silkscreen on canvas using publicity photo from niagara, created after monroe's death