Lithography

I’m a member of an association, now almost 60 years old, which has the aim of giving support to Swedish artists who work in France. The name is “Association Artistique Suédoise à Paris” and you can read more about it here (if you understand Swedish or French ... or make use of the translation tool). We organise exhibits, lotteries, visits to artist studios, museums… 

Last week we met some of “our” artists at a lithography workshop in the 19^th arrondissement, “A Fleur de Pierre” (see their site here). Some of “our” artists have already worked with lithography, some have not.

“A Fleur de Pierre” works according to traditional methods, invented in 1796. The owners gave us a brief explanation of the process. The word lithography has its origins in the ancient Greek lithos, meaning stone, and graphein, meaning to write. It’s a printing method based on the fact that oil and water don't mix, using extremely smooth limestone plates, gum, oil, acids, ink … Well, I’m not going to try to explain it all - you can rather go to Wikipedia here.

There are different manual presses in the workshop, but especially impressive is the more than one hundred year old printing press machine.

Here are some examples of artwork produced at this workshop.

Here you can see some of the participants during the presentation. For us, it was also an opportunity to discuss with the artists about how we best can assist them, to listen to new ideas… Of course, the discussion finished over a glass (or two).

For 17 years our association has been distributing a lithograph made by one of "our" artists to all of its some 200 members.