1939-2019
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NOTE: Russell Chatham stopped creating lithographs several years ago. We currently have a portfolio of “travel proof” lithos that are not signed and/or numbered. These are hand pulled from the same editions as the numbered pieces so the images are of the same quality. These pieces are for sale at a very low price. PLEASE CALL IF YOU ARE INTERESTED.
In addition to the travel proofs we do have one signed and numbered piece:
“Puget Sound” 26 x 22″
Please call for pricing and availability.
We are Chatham framing specialists. We have a custom designed frame that works perfectly for his subtlety and tone.
We float the pieces on silk with a silk wrapped matting that has a deep bevel that is also wrapped in silk. It is a very elegant presentation that is all archival.
Here are some examples of our framing on Chatham’s work.
Russell Chatham was born in San Francisco on October 27, 1939. He is the grandson of the great landscape painter Gottardo Piazzoni. In 1958 Chatham began exhibiting and since then has had something on the order of four hundred one man shows at museums, art centers, private galleries, schools, colleges and universities not only throughout the west in places like Sun Valley, Aspen, Santa Fe and Denver, but also in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Seattle, Dallas, San Francisco and Los Angeles. His work has also been exhibited in Europe and the Orient. Chatham began printmaking in 1981, and is today regarded as one of the world’s foremost lithographers.
Publications about Chatham include a catalogue called One Hundred Paintings, and another about his original lithographs called The Missouri Headwaters. Five new books are in production, scheduled for release in 2003. One is called Selected Lithographs, another is The Seasons, a survey of the large format canvasses, another is called The Intimate View, a review of the small acrylics and watercolors, another is strictly portraits, and finally, a book of the Marin County paintings done in 1999, 2000, and 2001. Chatham has been profiled in Esquire, Southwest Art, People, U.S. Art, Antiques and Fine Art, Architectural Digest, Smart, The Denver Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The San Francisco Examiner, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Seattle Times, The Associated Press, National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, and Fresh Air, PBS, and CBS Sunday Morning.
Among Chatham’s private collectors are authors Peter Matthiessen, the late Eudora Welty, P.J. O’Rourke, David Halberstam, Curt Gentry, Jim Harrison, Thomas McGuane, William Hjortsberg, James Crumley, the late Richard Hugo, James Welch, Richard Ford, Rick Bass, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Robbins, Carl Hiaasen, and the late Richard Brautigan; editors and publishers, Jann Wenner, the late Seymour Lawrence, Terry McDonell, and William Randolph Hearst, III; New York restaurateur Elaine Kaufman; cartoonists William Hamilton, Guindon, and the late B. Kliban; former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent; art critic Robert Hughes; media correspondents Tom Brokaw, Ed Bradley, Morley Safer, Van Gordon Sauter, and the late Charles Kuralt; entertainment personalities Michael Keaton, Rip Torn, Elizabeth Ashley, Jessica Lange, Sam Shepard, the late Sam Peckinpah, the late Slim Pickens, Margot Kidder, Jeff Bridges, Peter and Jane Fonda, Sydney Pollack, Jamie Lee Curtis, Sean Connery, Harry Dean Stanton, Angelica Huston, Jimmy Buffet, Dave Grusin, Don Henley, Glenn Frye, Dennis and Randy Quaid, Meg Ryan, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Robert Wagner, Jill St. John, Ali MacGraw, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford, and Harrison Ford.
Is it a Lithograph or Is it a Lithograph?
Almost all commercial printing that we see today is done using the process called lithography. For the art buyer, distinguishing between an original lithograph and a four-color reproduction is not simply a question of semantics. Depending, naturally, upon the quality of the artist, the former may have real value. Regardless of the quality of the artist, the latter is always worth very little.
To fully appreciate the meaning of the term original lithograph, it is important to understand just how one is produced. To determine if a print is an original, you must closely examine how the ink has been applied to the paper. This can be somewhat difficult with the naked eye, but can easily be done with a magnifying glass or jeweler’s loupe.
Process lithography always begins with a photograph of something. It can be a photograph of an original painting, a landscape, or a new car. In a laboratory the photograph is separated by a special camera into the four basic color elements which are red, yellow, blue and black. A negative is then made for each color. In the print shop the four color negatives are used to produce four printing plates. The structure of the images on these plates is that of mechanically spaced dots. These plates are then mounted on a four-color press and all four colors are printed simultaneously. It is possible to proceed from the photograph to the finished product in two days. In viewing a print produced in the above manner through a magnifying glass, the four standard- colored inks will appear as dots neatly arranged in rows. This tells you the plates were made photo-mechanically, and not by an artist’s hand.
By contrast, each plate used in the printing of an original lithograph has been hand drawn by the artist. In viewing the product of this process under the magnifying glass, the colors will appear either as a continuous tone, or as very irregular, oddly shaped, colored dots. In all cases this reflects the artist’s various methods and tools. As many as fifty different colors may be used in one work, each one requiring a separate plate. Every one of the inks for an original print is specially mixed by the artist and the printing process is similar to paint being blended and layered on a painting.
During the production of an original lithograph, the artist is directly involved in a hands-on manner, drawing each plate, choosing and mixing each ink and approving each color as it comes from the press. A single plate for an original lithograph may require twenty minutes or twenty hours of an artist’s time, depending upon its complexity. A lithograph with forty-one colors, or forty-one plates, could very well require 200 hours of the artist’s and printer’s time.
Please call for information regarding pricing and availability.
Houston’s Custom Framing and Fine Art
280 East Hersey St., Suite #11,
Ashland, OR 97520
541.482.1983
