Roll Me a Rainbow

Although better known today for her captivating Waterfall paintings, Pat Steir began her artistic career by studying printmaking at the Pratt Institute in New York City. Steir’s Roll Me a Rainbow visualizes the process for producing a lithograph. On the left side of the print, Steir included a series of marks using tusche ink wash and a lithographic crayon, the materials an artist would employ to create a design on the surface of a printing stone. On the right side, Steir added strokes of red, yellow, and blue ink to fill in the outlines of her flowers and squares. At the center, she made a large square using broad strokes of tusche ink wash, which she subsequently ruled with vertical lines. The square terminates in a fringe of dripping pigment along its bottom edge, an element that resembles her later Waterfall paintings. The title of this print refers to the instructions Steir received from her printer at Landfall Press, whose request to “roll me a rainbow” resulted in the artist’s addition of a color scale at the top of her image.