Richard Anuszkiewicz

I was not familiar with Richard Anuszkiewicz (1930-2020) or his work when he arrived at Graphicstudio, so we needed to get together and discuss what he was looking for. He was an Op Artist who did many prints, but we wanted to do something different! Our first project was “Triangular Yellows.”

Instead of printing all the shapes on the same support, we decided to print each leg of the triangle separately and then cut them out to fit into one another and mount them to a rag board support. Each leg had a different flat color which was created by a dry roll, then the stripes for each leg were printed by silkscreen over the flats.

We had to order a large diameter roller in order to have a seamless flat surface. The solvent-base screen inks have very powerful fumes so we explored the use of water-base materials. The colors were very bright and printed beautifully. Richard wanted the stripes to “stand up” off of the flat in relief.

In order to produce this effect we came up with two procedures. The first was to find the thickest photo-stencil material for the screen. But, that wasn’t high enough for the line to stand-up off the flat. Next we tried “double-dropping” the lines on top off one another. This eventually worked after we tightened the registration with pins and mixed the ink so it would sit-up on top of the first run.

After all the printing was completed— lots of time was consumed in cutting out the shapes which had been printed on rag-board and fitting them together without any gaps! We used the same technique for “Blue Tinted Star” and “Grey Tinted Rainbow.”

I enjoyed working with Richard and learning a lot about color and creating all the processes for his project. The top two pieces can be viewed and purchased at the Zane Bennett Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico.