Rose du Louvre

The prominent French sculptor Jean-Michel Othoniel loves collaborating with artisans using ancient techniques, and has been working with Michael Woolworth for more than ten years. He asked here for something that seemed impossible: to pass a stretched canvas through the press to print on top of it, and the workshop invented an unorthodox technique to do just that. After several years of experimenting with the artist, they perfected an extremely delicate, time-consuming process involving covering the support with gold leaf, then transferring the drawing to a lithographic matrix and printing it on top of the gold in black ink, creating an intense luminosity. This is one of six images of flowers employing this technique on a large scale.