Geometric Plaid 

Patrick Nagel made this screenprint, titled 'Geometric Plaid', sometime before his untimely death in 1984. Screenprinting, also known as serigraphy, is a process of creating an image by forcing ink through a mesh stencil. It's a technique that lends itself well to bold graphics, as we can see here. Nagel’s work is interesting because it sits right on the cusp between fine art and commercial design. He often made his images for magazines and album covers, so his aesthetic had to be readily legible. The look of the image, its very high contrast and flat planes of color, is partly a consequence of the printing process. Each color is applied separately, which leads to a simplified visual language. In this piece, Nagel's distinctive style uses sleek lines and reductive forms to depict a fashionable woman, very much of the 1980s. He captures the era's taste for clean, graphic design, but also hints at the labor and industrial processes involved in mass media.