An Early Experiment

The Locomotive, 9 x 11 inch stone block lithograph by George C. Clark  AVAILABLE
(#6 from a signed and numbered edition of 10 plus 2 artist's proofs)

Back in the 1970s I experimented with various printmaking media.  I studied etching and woodcut and linoleum cut techniques with Howard Albert at the Pauper's Press in Chicago.  BettyAnn Mocek taught me a photomechanical process to make silkscreen prints from black-and-white line art at Evanston Art Center.  To learn stone block and metal plate lithography I went to a printmakers' collective where Bill Cass taught techniques and rented studio time for me to use the presses.  

The first thing Bill taught me was how to remove an earlier image from a litho stone and grind the surface smooth to accept my new image.  When my stone was ready, Bill did a little demonstration on another stone of how you could make marks with litho pencils and crayons and liquid litho inks in various ways to get different effects.  After he printed his block, he invited me to have a go at the block I had prepared and try the techniques he had showed me.

I hadn't prepared anything or given much thought to subject matter, but I didn't want to waste my laboriously-prepared stone on random lines or squiggles, so I took a litho pencil and started to draw an image I pulled out of my head.  It turned out to be this vaguely British old-fashioned steam locomotive.  I tried adding tones with various scribbling and hatching methods, drew with and without a straightedge, applied ink with a brush as well as spattered from a toothbrush, and made smoke by rubbing dry litho pigment into the stone with a soft cloth.  Finally I made some white streaks by scraping back into the stone with a steel tool.  When we proofed the result, I was pleased enough with it to get some buff-colored Stonehenge paper and print an edition of 10 plus 2 artist's proofs.  I had only saved one of these prints, but I recently inherited #6 when a relative I had gifted it to decades ago passed away.

This is not my first piece a railroad art, but it predates my formal AGE OF IRON series by almost 20 years.