Word: stella
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...Frank Stella, whose sparse, geometric abstract paintings have influenced current trends in the medium for over 25 years, lectured on the use of painterly space before a sold-out Sanders Theater audience last night...
...folklore is often given a melancholy identity, like the typist in T.S. Eliot's Waste Land, who takes her lover as wearily as she lights her stove. On a happier side, Rose Fritz, the national speed-typing champion from 1906 to 1909, never lost to a man, and Stella Willins, the 1926 world's amateur champion, once typed 264 words in one minute, repeating a memorized sentence. The report that the sentence was "How I loathe this work" is apocryphal...
Gemini was known for the obsessive, flawless precision of its printing. It encouraged Stella to make large images by using silk-screen or flat-bed lithography from metal plates-means that more "purist" printmakers, wedded to the nuances of stone lithography, tended to reject as commercially tainted. Stella began to push printmaking toward the scale of painting. The climax of this process was reached in an extraordinary series of prints he did with Tyler Graphics from 1980 onward...
...these prints is racing circuits. The places the new prints are named after-Imola in Italy, Pergusa in Sicily, Talladega in Alabama-are all professional speed tracks; their plans, sinuous and flexing, are echoed in the serpentine calligraphy of the images. Naturally, though, they are much more than layout. Stella's drawing, in a print like Pergusa Three, has a kind of wristy expansiveness; its loops and contours recall 1930 Picasso, as does Stella's elegant play with collage in the lacy patches within the curves. At times, as in Talladega Three II, the printed surface gets jammed...
Moreover, there is an interesting give-and-take between Stella's recent paintings and his prints. They cannibalize one another, in a way. His latest series, the black-and-white "Swan Engravings," is printed from etched magnesium sheets that include the offcuts from his huge metal-relief paintings. Butted together like a big collage, these fragments-some ready etched with existing textures, others reworked-provide an inordinately rich field of arcs and patterns. The conjunction of Stella and his master printer Kenneth Tyler promises to change everyone's sense of what printing can do. -By Robert Hughes