Hand Pulled Prints
There’re some in the art community that try to claim that lithographs shouldn’t be called ‘Prints’, they should be called reproductions and that hand-pulled prints – which is where the artist applies paint or ink directly to plates (or stone or wood carved planks, etc) and manually presses the paper onto the plate and pulls them by hand – are the only things that should be called ‘prints’. They even go so far as to claim that calling lithographs ‘Prints’ is akin to fraud.
There are others who take the point that while yes, calling a reproduction an original is fraudulent, lithography is nothing more and nothing less than a technological update (starting with Gutenberg when he adapted an olive oil or wine press in 1439) to the exact same process that hand pulling is, vis: to reproduce the artist’s vision for the greatest consumption. Period.
Some detractors claim that each hand pulled print is actually ‘an original’, since there’s no original painting on canvas, each reproduction can be called an original.
To which the retort has been: the Prints are still reproductions; the original has just been created on a printing plate or other substrate to allow for the transfer of that image repeatedly. Still others claim them to be ‘original reproductions’.
Owen is fine calling his lithographs ‘Prints’ because he never represents them as original drawings, and they’re printed at a printer’s, on a printing press.
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