Rock N’ Roll 5: A Celebration of Stone Lithography is a portfolio exchange set up by Louisiana State University Graduate students in combination with 14 different schools around the country.  The collaboration pays homage to the history of stone lithography, a method of printmaking that involves limestone, but most importantly highlights contemporary artists’ new ideas of working with the stone.  The uniform scale of each print emphasizes the difference of styles from each region. 
It was obvious to me where one school ended and the other school started, and as I glanced around the gallery, there were bold pops of color that immediately peaked my attention and made me want to walk over.  The great thing about the setup of the show was that right next to those bright prints were the more muted prints: prints that made me want to stand there looking for more than just a few seconds.  As a whole, the show calls your attention in one direction and keeps it moving throughout the whole gallery.
What I noticed as I walked around the room were two distinct types of artists: ones that worked on the stone as a drawing and others that just used it as a means to an end. Nathan Pietrykowski, one of the producers of this print exchange, draws.  His print, Backstage at Damien’s, is whimsical, and colorful; it has caricatures and cartoons and is all around a fun print to look at.  Backstage at Damien’s is actually a memory of Pietrykowski’s childhood and a shooting that occurred at a bar.  With this in mind, it contrasts childhood innocence and naivety with darker undertones that, in the moment, aren’t there. 
Alongside Pietrykowski, Eric Euler produced the exchange and his print, Death, was on display as well.   Euler stands on the other side of the fence; he uses the stone as a vehicle to create his abstractions: a metaphor for the disruption of pattern and change.  It is not a literal interpretation of death in the print with its bright colors and clear shapes, the title, then, begs me to attempt to make a correlation.  Euler states that it’s not about death, but “more in the sense of taking risks and starting a new beginning,” a huge leap of faith in the art and life.  Lithographers are getting back into the daily grind, literally, and what could be more Rock N’ Roll than that?
http://rocknroll5lithoexchange.tumblr.com/