‘Morning’ by Roy Williams (1907-1976), an embossed 20th century serigraph.

Craftsmanship

Roy Williams (1907-1976) was an artist and entertainer for The Walt Disney Studios. He was hired by Walt Disney in 1930 after his graduation at the Fremont High School in Los Angeles. He managed to work and study at the same time during his first years at Walt Disney. He worked during the day and created animated shorts, and studied during the night at the Chouinard Art Institute. He created and designed several ideas, stories, cartoons, shorts and art for both Walt Disney and other renowned companies such as The New Yorker.

Serigraphy

The term ‘Serigraph’ is quite a ‘young’ term. A group of New York artists, under the auspices of the Federal Art Project, experimented with silk-screening for the first time in 1938. Serigraphy became popular by both galleries and collectors and more and more artist started to use this method. Major artists, such as Tom Wesselmann, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, started experimenting with serigraphy in the 1960’s. And now, serigraphy is still a popular medium used by contemporary artists around the globe.

Serigraphy (or also known these days as ‘screen printing’) was a labour-intensive procedure that could take days or even weeks to complete. A serigraph is made by forcing ink through a series of silk-screens. Each silk screen had to be treated by hand and for colourful and detailed serigraphs a lot of silk-screens were needed. The more coloured the serigraph, the more work it took for the artist to create the artwork.