Silk Screen Printing: individual artistry meets mass-production.

Silk screening is one of the earliest recorded printing techniques. During the Song Dynasty, artisans in China were stretching human hair over wooden frames, and making stencils out of leaves. Over one thousand years later, this technique, only a little changed, is used for everything from t-shirts to snowboard graphics to famous canvas pieces like Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe.

Process
A screen is made from a woven mesh, stretched over a wooden frame, where a paper stencil laid on top is used to block out an ink or paint.
The stencil is usaly the negative of the desired effect.
The screen is then placed on a surface or material with the ink or paint ready, a blade or bar then pushes the ink over the stenciled image, the screen can then be lifted clean away.

Some of the well known screen printing comes from the 1960’s with multiple works of Marilyn Monroe’s face by Andy Warhol. These happened after her death.
Andy was quoted
In August 62 I started doing silkscreens. I wanted something stronger that gave more of an assembly line effect. With silkscreening you pick a photograph, blow it up, transfer it in glue onto silk, and then roll ink across it so the ink goes through the silk but not through the glue. That way you get the same image, slightly different each time. It was all so simple quick and chancy. I was thrilled with it.
Marilyn Munro was an icon of Andy Warhol’s screen printing pop art sensation, it was a bold and colourful statement of the pop scene.

One the most common forms of screen printing is stencil art.
It has the same ideas of pushing ink through a stencil to show the negative image, these can be seen in most cities around the world in form of street signs and graph art or street art.
Because of the legalities of street art not all of it is athetics, a well heard of artist named banksy has been using stencils in his work.
He often is quite political and makes the viewer ask a question.
I think banksy’s work relates more to me than Andy’s rough looking attempt at Marilyn Monroes faces