Silk Painting

In Hawaii he started painting on silk. This is a humming bird from that era:

Silk Screening:

 I have no images showing his work in this medium but it is a tedious complicated one. The basic idea is to take a large piece of acetate and layout the image that is to be painted by this process. It is ap rocess that allows a person to produce hundreds of copies with minimal effort, once the screen is produced. The drawback is that the screen cannot be modified to accept another image. One must produce a separate screen for each image.

After the image acetate has been laid out on the acetate, the image that is to be covered with paint is carefully outlines with a sharp blade, and then removed from the sheet, leaving a spare like a silhouette - which is what it really is. The artist prepares a heavy duty frame over which is stretched tightly the sheet of silk. It is carefully tacked at frequent intervals to kee the entire sheet taut. 

Then the acetate silhouette is laid over the silk sheet and secured in place with tacks or tape. Acetone is then used to dissolve the acetate at which point it “melts” into the silk sheet.  After the acetone has dissolved, the silk sheet has a tough acetate silhouette.  The frame is tightly secured onto a sheet of plywood that is larger than the frame, using a heavy duty hinge as long as the frame. 

After the prepared silk screen is prepared and secured in place, sheets of paper the proper size are laid by the device. They are laid one at a time under the screen which is then pressed tightly down on the base to be sure that there is no gap between the screen and the paper. Then a strip of the proper color of paint or ink is laid completely across one  end of the frame. A heavy squilgee that is exactly as wide as the inside dimension of the frame is used to carefully, slowly and forcefully pull the paint/ink across the screen to the far size.

Then the squilgee is laid down, the frame is very carefully raised being careful to not move the sheet of paper, at which point the screen sheet can be removed.  Andy Warhol’s famous Campbell soup cans in single colors were probably done by silk screen. The final process, after one has pulled as many copies as one wants, is to carefull clean up the paint with the proper thinner. To leave paint in is to ruin the screen.

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