A bowling-shirt machine helped turn screen printing into the T-shirt boom
In 1960 Michael Vasilantone began selling a rotating press built to print team names on bowling shirts. It was soon redirected to a new craze, the printed T-shirt. Today garments account for over half of American screen printing, a technique that also gave Andy Warhol his famous repeated faces.
The method is simple in principle. A fine mesh is stretched tight over a frame, and parts of it are blocked with a stencil. A blade first floods the open mesh with ink, then a squeegee presses the screen against the surface so ink is drawn through the gaps as the mesh springs back, a moment printers call snap-off. Each colour needs its own screen. Silk was the traditional mesh; polyester is now the usual choice, with nylon and stainless steel for special jobs.
Modern stencils are made photographically. A light-sensitive emulsion is spread across the mesh, dried and exposed to ultraviolet light through a film of the design; exposed areas harden and the rest washes out with water. Early in the 1910s, Roy Beck, Charles Peter and Edward Owens experimented with chromate-sensitised emulsions and brought photo stencils to commercial printing, though acceptance was slow. Since 1963, screens have also been rolled into tubes for continuous roll-to-roll work such as textured wallpaper.
The technique descends from block printing in China, which influenced Japanese Ise katagami stencils, and reached Western Europe from Asia around the late 18th century. In the 1930s a group of artists including Anthony Velonis coined the word serigraphy, from Latin for silk and Greek for writing, to separate fine-art printing from industrial work. Velonis long got sole credit for the New York WPA poster shop's methods, a view Guido Lengweiler corrected in a history published in English in 2016.
Warhol is credited with making the process an art form, notably with his 1962 Marilyn Diptych, and Robert Rauschenberg took it up that same year after visiting his studio. In London, printer Chris Prater of Kelpra Studio worked with Eduardo Paolozzi on As Is When (1965), twelve prints about Wittgenstein's ideas. Sister Mary Corita Kent won international fame for rainbow-bright serigraphs of peace and care, and cheap materials made the look a staple of DIY posters and album covers.
Source: Screen printing
