Tetra

Dennis Ray Beall

Dennis Beall was part of a group of Northern California printmakers that were experimenting in the mid 1950s with the gestural freedom of Abstract Expressionism, using lithography. Employing a single stone they would print color after color to build the composition. Because of the lack of galleries willing to exhibit their works and virtually no collectors, the editions of these works were small, meant more to trade with colleagues, so they are quite rare.

Beall helped establish lithography at San Francisco State College and he used the medium as a painter uses a canvas, covering the whole stone with the image. When you compare at the lithographs that were created at SFSC by different artists in the mid 1950s you began to recognize the stones that were used by the irregular edges, chips that had occurred to the stone over the years.

Beall commented on his lithographs:"The stone may be resensitized without regrinding. Areas of the preceding drawing may be retained, other areas scrubbed or scraped, new designe elements introduced, old ones reinforced...The enormous freedom implied by this system lies in its directness. The communication between the artist and his materials, the successive acts of printing, drawing, scrubbing, and correcting create a continuum which cannot be duplicated in the traditional workshop." This impression of "Tetra" is illustrated in "California Society of Printmakers - One Hundred Years 1913-2013," page 20.