Winter Evening

 

Juliette Steele

  1909 - 1980 (biography)

1947  

lithograph 

8 x 10" image 

pencil, lower right 

2-10 

titled, lower left; dated, lower right 

 

cream wove Warrens Oldestyle 

published 

 

MASC169 

SOLD

San Francisco-based artist Juliette Steele is often recognized for her city scenes and ebulient, vivid abstract watercolors. However, this small format, black and white lithograph highlights another facet of her creative sensibility. Wisps of smokey automatic line are rendered in negative space; unlike the usual technique of drawing the image on the stone, Steele has rolled a square of solid black ink onto the matrix, into which she's scratched the image, making it emerge as if out of the shadows. Her unsual process, careful and slowly executed, creates a composition made more striking by how elegant and unrestrained it appears.