The New York painter Dan Walsh has long had parallel practices in printmaking and bookmaking. While a painter’s works on paper are often either preliminary sketches or after-the-fact reproductions, Walsh has always taken a more experimental and playful approach. In book form, he works through progressions, running his vocabulary of forms through incremental expansions and digressions, always on the watch for a new composition that might suddenly come into view. With regard to printmaking, it’s often been noted that his approach to painting has much in common with woodblock and silkscreen printing, in which layers of varying transparency are built up atop one another. Walsh applies paint to his canvases in passes, each color inverting and offsetting the ones underneath. This way of working requires a fair degree of planning crossed with a willingness to risk diversions in the moment. Perhaps it’s this combination of steadfastness and improvisation that allows Walsh to keep finding ways to evolve his structures in surprising directions.

This latest silkscreen edition entitled “Supply” is closely modeled on his painting called “Surplus” from 2020. For this print version Walsh proposed that the criss-crossing lozenges be bisected into two colors. Given that the curved ends of these painted lozenges are carefully formed by a brush of that very same width, it would be impossible to split these colors in a painting. But because Walsh doesn’t ask for prints to mimic his paintings, he is free to use a print like this as a kind of oblique mirror, distorting a familiar structure in order to find the new ones to come.

Title: Supply

Materials: 14 colors Screenprint

Paper: Saunders Waterford

Size: 37” x 37”

Rarity: Limited edition of 20 / Ap5 / PP5

Signature: signed

Frame: Not included

Published by: Keigo Prints Inc.