Actress - Hughie Lee-Smith (NEW)
Actress, Hughie Lee-Smith

Actress

Artist

Hughie Lee-Smith

Nationality

American

Heritage

African American

Medium

Offset Lithograph

Date

1993

Dimensions

29 x 22 inches

Edition Size

100 prints in this edition

Printer

Robert "Bob" Franklin

Provenance

Brandywine Workshop and Archives

Location

Philadelphia, PA

About the Work

From the Artist

For me the theatre is a source of endless fascination. This attraction has subliminally influenced my choice of subject matter throughout my career and can, perhaps, be traced to an ineradicable memory of my early firsthand experience in an around the stage as actor singer and dancer. So, visual aspects of theater have a way of emerging in much of my artwork. The composition of Actress is an assemblage of elements that suggest the stage: the curtain, the flats, the bit of architecture, and the balloons. Altogether the print speaks, through symbolism, to the make-believe nature of theater. For instance, the stylized figure and two masks on the flat left of the actress represents the diversity of personas available to the actor. The actress reading her lines and gesticulating is a common sight at play rehearsals. 
From Brandywine Workshop and Archives records

Hughie Lee-Smith designed Actress, 1993, a color offset lithograph in an edition of 100. Smith, primarily a painter, created black and white prints for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in Cleveland during the 1930s. He had never printed offset lithographs prior to Brandywine. Allan Edmunds recalls Smith being completely lost when he first considered printing in color because it was a different approach than working in black and white and lacked the painterly qualities associated with his oil and acrylics. He knows that if he puts a color down and doesn't like it, he can wait for it to dry and paint over it, never having to compromise or plan out color selections strategically. However, the idea of layering color, organizing, and registering was difficult: "It made the process seem commercial." Smith, 78, had to learn how to work with color in fixed, printed layers rather than glazes and manipulating the physical color. This print gave an older artist the opportunity to do something he had never done before. Actress was difficult to print because it included eight different colors with varying densities, making registration difficult. The printer used several split-fountain printings (dividing the ink fountain into more than one color) to achieve the richness and diversity of the print's colors, creating two different shades of a single color—for example, red and burnt red—and made several passes through the press to make the offset inks appear less translucent.
—Adapted from "Fresh, Human and Personal: Signature of Brandywine Workshop," Three Decades of American Printmaking: The Brandywine Workshop Collection (Manchester, VT: Hudson Hills Press, 2004)
 

About the Artist

Hughie Lee-Smith

Born in Eustis, FL, painter, printmaker, and dancer Hughie Lee-Smith attended classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland Institute of Art, and John Huntington Polytechnic Institute, Cleveland, OH; and the Art School of the Detroit Society o...

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