Sometime during the late 1960s, Celmins brought a camera onto an ocean pier near her home in Venice, California, and took a photograph of the water’s surface. Back in her studio, she painstakingly copied the picture in a graphite drawing. Later, at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, she translated the drawing into the lithograph shown here.

Celmins’s seascape is an outlier in the genre. There is no action. No crashing wave, no storm or ship, no horizon line—just a patch of gently undulating water. Yet despite this lack of content, Celmins went to great lengths to recreate the photograph as a drawing and again as a print, producing a tension between the seeming banality of the subject and the care with which it was rendered. Perhaps this tension is the point; through it, Celmins communicates something profound about the challenge of discerning and communicating the meaning of raw matter.

—Text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023)