#screenprints

Decorative Sunday

The Warli are an indigenous tribe of western India, living in the mountain and coastal areas along the Maharashtra-Gujarat border north of Mumbai. Their artistic traditions date back 5000 years, with patterns of circles, triangles, and squares that accrete to form dynamic natural forms like expressive, fluid pictograms. Today, these patterns may be found on the walls and floors of both domestic and community spaces in Warli communities.

In The Deep, a limited-edition, hand-bound book, silkscreen-printed by hand on recycled cotton paper with unique cover marbling, and published in Chennai, India by Tara Books in 2020, the brothers Mayur and Tushar Vayeda adapt the Warli style of their community to present the dynamic relationships between human habitation and the depths of the sea. The text by Arun and Gita Wolf is derived from an oral narrative by the Vayeda brothers.

View more Decorative Sunday posts.

THE MOUNTAIN GOATS: A CRAB VICTORIOUS poster now available in my store! Boston Aug 1. If you missed getting one at the show, now you can remedy that.

Adolph Dehn, The Great God Pan (1940)

Over at the Philadelphia Museum of Art site you can see the multiple layers of this screen print by Adolph Dehn of some nuns painting the god Pan. Pretty great.

This lithograph is also great:

I'd never heard of Dehn's work before — he was a friend of the great Wanda Gág, whose book Millions of Cats I read to my kids “millions and billions and trillions” of times.

He did a lot of nun pieces:

Here's a biography of Dehn from The Smithsonian:

Dehn's satirical prints of European and New York scenes were the product of an unconventional Minnesota upbringing and an iconoclastic eye. The son of a feminist, socialist mother and an atheist, anarchist father, he was not destined for a quiet life. He studied at the Minneapolis Art Institute and the Art Students League in New York, after which he was imprisoned as a conscientious objector during World War I. On his release Dehn took odd jobs and made his way to Europe, where his work as a magazine illustrator supported him and his Russian immigrant wife in their travels. While in Europe Dehn was a critical observer of the social scene, especially in Vienna and Berlin, and a light-hearted painter of park scenes and landscapes. In 1930, after his return from Europe, his work, on both European and New York subjects, was shown at the Weyhe Gallery in New York City. The critical response was good, but sales were only moderate. In the mid-1930s, Dehn began to paint watercolor landscapes, which proved immensely popular. As a result, new commercial opportunities opened, including travels through the United States, Mexico, and Venezuela. His fame led to offers to teach and then to work for the Navy during World War II. Throughout the forties, fifties, and sixties, Dehn and his wife traveled around the world, doing commercial work and lithography. His work became less satirical and more fanciful, and he experimented with new graphic techniques. He died of a heart attack in 1968 while planning new trips, beginning a book, and organizing a retrospective.

Broken Fingaz

New prints have arrived! ✨ Including both APC screenprints and my official Jaws AP's from @VicePressNews !