The Magic of Lithography

Of all the Printmaking processes, Lithography seems the most diabolical and indeed is sometimes likened to witchcraft. So why do I and many other artists love lithography?

In this article:

1. What is lithography?

2. The origins of lithography

3. Modern lithography

When I was an art student learning Printmaking, my tutor believed etchings should only be in black and white and he didn’t think much of my efforts to make multi-plate colour etchings. He packed me off to the lithography department in another part of town, where it was acceptable and encouraged to make colour prints.

I was soon hooked on printing zinc litho plates on an offset press and on the prints of late 19th century French artists such as Toulouse-Lautrec and especially Vuillard.

The colour and structure as well as their assuredness, but also looseness of execution appealed as well as their social commentary themes.

I was seduced by the versatility of the process that can mimic any kind of painting and drawing technique, as well as the magic that happens, actually through chemistry.

Lithography is a unique printmaking process, based on the principle that grease and water resist each other. Once the lithography plate is prepared, multiple prints can be made from the original image. Artists love the richness of printing in ink, and being able to capture direct drawing alongside more painterly mark making, with the possibility of adding layers of colour.

The original process was invented towards the end of the 18th century by Alois Senefelder, who was the son of an actor.

The family lived in Munich and Alois went to study law at Ingolstadt in Bavaria. At age 20, his father died so Alois had to give up studying to support his family.

Alois had an interest in theatre and acting which he applied to writing plays as a way to earn a living and his knowledge of chemistry learned at school to search for an economical way of printing and publishing his plays.

His experiments with the locally available Kelheim limestone lead to the invention of lithography. The story goes that for lack of paper he wrote a laundry list on a piece of stone in his workshop with a greasy ink that he had prepared and afterwards found that when the stone was dampened the image could be inked and transferred to paper.

Although it’s a popular myth that lithography was discovered by chance and has the whiff of alchemy, Senefelder was deliberate and thoughtful in his experimentation and did not arrive at his discovery by accident.

Originally, he actually named his invention ‘Chemical Printing’ because it depends on the principle that oil and water don’t mix. It uses combinations of greasy drawing materials and acidified gum Arabic to fix an ink-receptive image on the stone or plate. Only later in France it started to be called lithography, meaning “writing on stone”.

The process seems mysterious, rare and obscure compared to other printing methods, although the making of an image can be as immediate and direct or as subtle and sophisticated as drawing or painting, and it’s this mystery and rarity that is part of what attracts many artists today.

Lithography was and still is a commercial and industrial printing process. Without realising, you come across it every day, from labels on bottles and jars to colour magazines, books and newspapers. Of course these days the process is photographic, and the presses are gigantic, but in the past all these types of items were hand-drawn onto lithographic stones and plates.

At the same time, artists started to appreciate the freedom that drawing with a greasy crayon on stone gave them, compared with the labour-intensive processes of engraving and etching on copper, and the ease of printing painterly layers of colour.

Nowadays, the original hand-made methods are kept alive by artists making prints, with an expanded range of creative approaches that includes the photographic and digital techniques developed for industry, as well as more experimental and hybrid applications of the principles of lithography such as Kitchen Lithography, Mokulitho and now even Lithino.

Who could have predicted that you could do lithography on aluminium foil in your kitchen or combined with woodcut and linocut in the same process?

There are very few places in London where you can study such a range of lithography techniques and City Lit is one of them. I hope to see you there!