David Hockney Glossary of Printmaking Techniques

Screenprint, or silkscreen, is a process in which ink is pushed through a mesh screen using a stencil. Each colour is typically applied through a separate screen, which makes the technique particularly effective for bold colour areas, sharp edges and layered graphic compositions.

Screenprint is not the medium most commonly associated with Hockney, but it plays an important role in his printmaking nonetheless, particularly in combination with lithography. Certain prints from The Weather Series, like Rain, Snow, Lightning and The Sun are traditionally catalogued as “lithograph and screenprint in colours,” while the complete set is described as six lithographs, five with screenprint. This hybrid construction is telling. Hockney used screenprint not as an isolated graphic statement, but as part of a broader workshop language that allowed colour, surface and composition to work together with greater force.

The medium suited him because it intensified visual clarity. Where lithography could retain the intimacy of drawing, screenprint could flatten and strengthen colour. It gave Hockney another way to organise space, simplify forms and heighten decorative effect. In works from the 1970s and 1990s, this became especially useful as he moved further into seriality, fragmentation and bolder formal patterning. Hockney continued this experimental approach in Some New Prints, where lithography and screenprinting were likewise combined to create depth and contrast in this later body of work.