SCREENS AND SCREAMS

I grow up as an artist in the late seventies, admiring the bald, colorful and beautiful silk screen prints of Pop artist Andy Warhol.

I had the opportunity to met Andy for the first time already in 1976. Through the following years I got to know him a little bit more, by being in his entourage in both New York, Paris and Stockholm. We dined at the legendary Chinese Restaurant Mr Show, and partied at the enormous Studio 54. I visited him at his Factory and showed him a series of hand printed silk screens I had made together with my old school buddy Rainer Laakso. He was amazed and thought it was very funny that we had made art in his pop art technic with our own input and based on his life more then his art. I exhibited my and Rainer’s works in Bonlow Gallery on Green Street, and in the avant garde gallery Lucky Strike at St Marks Place. On the opening of our show ” Screens & Screams” a young artist named Jean Michel come to look at what we had done. We had framed all our silk screen prints on canvas hanging stretched in ropes tied roughly on big wooden frames overlapping one another in a American Indian Tribal way. When the show was over we had no space for the frames and put all of them outside the gallery. Jean Michel who lived near by picked them up as he was an even poorer artist at the time then we where. He later used our frames for his own canvases and it became his new trade mark. Many years later I came into the Serpentine Gallery in London at the Jean Michel Basquiat exhibit recognizing my frames on the wall.

The next time I came to New York I called Andy and we met again at a dinner party and we got even closer. I showed him my ”Camouflage” prints, and he got inspired. He was friendly, open, and yet reserved, I was attentive, impressed and a nice looking party boy. Andy had his wig, I had my hope.

I listened to learn, he wrote down some of what I said., in his little book. It became a mutual exchange. He showed me New York’s night life, I showed him my enthusiastic art soul. I was impressed of all the many big and expensive things he showed me and I said “My God that must be expensive ?“, “I will call you Tommy DOLLAR“ he replied. A name that stuck to me for the rest of my life, like a sticky price tag. I felt at home in NYC and loved the crazy arty life I had there in the early eighties. We used to call him “Drella“ part Dracula, because he would suck out our blood during the day , and part Cinderella, as Andy used to leave the party to go home at midnight.

To hang around Andy was like a blood transfusion. It was only years later when I saw his Camouflage paintings , inspired by mine, that I realized I had given him my blood.

— Thomas Dellert

Screen printing is a printing technique that uses a woven mesh to support an ink-blocking stencil. The attached stencil forms open areas of mesh that transfer ink or other printable materials which can be pressed through the mesh as a sharp-edged image onto a substrate. A roller or squeegee is moved across the screen stencil, forcing or pumping ink past the threads of the woven mesh in the open areas.

Screen printing is also a stencil method of print making in which a design is imposed on a screen of silk or other fine mesh, with blank areas coated with an impermeable substance, and ink is forced through the mesh onto the printing surface. It is also known as silkscreen, serigraphy, and serigraph printing.