John Lindsay House

Joe Liles, standing next to the cupola on top of Watts Hall.

John Lindsay House

1978

Lithography is an art form where a stone (lithos) is used to produce a drawing (graph). It works by drawing on a smooth lithography stone with a wax pen or oil-based ink. The stone with its oil-based image is taken through a chemical process that creates a slightly etched image on the stone. An oil-based ink is then applied to the stone which is dampened with water. The damp stone repels the ink, and the ink sticks only to the etched image on the stone. Paper is placed on top of the stone and everything is passed through a press that transfers the ink image to the paper. That’s the way lithography originated.
Much later, machine-driven printing presses were invented to do the same thing using the principle that oil and water don’t mix. This mechanized process was much more efficient form of printing than using a lithographic stone. This was the major form of printing for many years and is still used today by some printers.
This is the method by which the “John Lindsay House” was printed. The John Lindsay House was on my family’s farm in Wadesboro, NC. John Lindsay was a tenant farmer who lived in this old farm house with his family. John paid no rent to my father. His house had electricity, but John’s family got their water from a well, and had an outhouse for a toilet. John grew a garden and raised chickens and other sources of protein to feed his family. John and his two sons would help us on the farm when it came time to round-up the cattle or to bail hay. They earned additional income to support the family from various crops they grew and from an annual crop of peanuts. This is how many people lived in the rural South of that time.
By the time I did the pen-and-ink drawing for this print, John Lindsay and his family had moved on to a different lifestyle as tenant farming became more and more obsolete. I still have fond childhood memories of talking with John and playing basketball with his sons.
A Tiger Swallowtail butterfly and a Queen’s Anne Lace dominate the foreground of this print.