Tacita Dean signing Eclipse Drawings at Gemini. Photo © 2026 Suzanne Felsen

In April 2024, Tacita Dean traveled to Eagle Pass, Texas, with a singular intention: to watch a total solar eclipse. Having filmed several total eclipses over the years, she wanted to experience one without being behind the lens. Yet when the eclipse arrived, instinct took over. She reached for her camera — and not looking through the viewfinder, she twisted and turned it toward the sun, spinning and snapping with little aim or calculation. When the negatives were processed, something extraordinary emerged: not photographs in any conventional sense, but drawings made with sunlight itself, loops and arcs of luminous energy seared onto blackness of the sky. "These were just miraculous," Dean has said. "I thought, my God, this is drawing with the sun — you can see the bite of the moon."

Those accidental gestures have now been translated into a suite of twelve screenprints produced in collaboration with Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles. The Eclipse Drawings, previewed in exhibitions in 2025 and completed in 2026, are screenprints of exceptional technical ambition — each print rendered in as many as eighteen colors — yet what they convey feels spontaneous: glowing lines and looping forms suspended against deep black grounds, caught in between celestial documentation and pure abstraction.

The scale of the works varies dramatically, from intimate prints measuring just 12 × 18 inches to expansive sheets approaching 30 × 44 inches, each format calibrating a different relationship between the viewer and the light Dean has captured. Together, the twelve works form a visual sequence that reads almost like a map — an improvised charting of a moment of cosmic alignment. They represent a collision of time events: the few minutes of totality, when the moon covers the sun, with the seconds it takes for the shutter of her analog camera to open to expose the negative.

In surrendering the viewfinder, Dean discovered a method that collapsed the boundary between observation and mark-making, between the celestial and the handmade. The screenprinting process at Gemini — with its capacity for layered, luminous color — proved an ideal medium for translating that discovery into editions of lasting presence.

Workshop Notes

Tacita traveled to Eagle Pass, Texas, to observe the solar eclipse in April 2024, not with a preconceived notion of creating a series of prints but simply to observe and photograph.  As always, her medium was film, not digital, and Tacita came to us to propose the idea of making a series of prints from the photographs she’d made with the light of the eclipsing sun. Tacita liked the physicality of screenprinting versus a traditional photo-print – the “texture” of the tone and the richness of the blacks, something she had observed that we had previously achieved with the Hands & Feet series by John Baldessari.     

While the prints were derived from photographs, we all think about the images as drawings. Rather than using a traditional 4-color process photo-printing approach, where the darker tone is printed and the highlights are left as bare paper, I decided to print the inverse:  the actual line work of the “drawings” would be built up in a series of white and colored layers on top of the black background. Early stages of proofing progressed between the end of 2024 and early 2025, in preparation for Tacita’s visit to Gemini in the summer of 2025. With the addition of printmaker T Kane to the Gemini screenshop, our team was set to work on developing the series into the final prints.  

Our first step was to have high-quality scans made of her negatives; we worked with them in Photoshop, manipulating the levels of brightness and contrast to pull out the nuanced tones in each of her images.  Each of the twelve were broken down into seven layers, to capture the very fine green tone as well as the bright whites and dense blacks.  These seven layers allowed us to control the luminosity of each of the final images.  As the project developed, a formula for screenprinting the images coalesced.

Each print starts with a flat black background, double-printed to give maximum darkness. The first four fullest halftone layers are printed in a transparent white, giving us the soft “haze” in the background and laying the foundation for the body of the light trail.   More layers of increasingly opaque browns and whites are added, which serve to add warmth and build the gradation within the drawing, taking it from being a flat color to a shape with dimension, and ultimately a very transparent yellow layer is added to establish the “feeling of the sun,” as Tacita put it.   More layers of dark, transparent gray layers and green are added to darken the background and create contrast. All this allows us to manipulate the opacity and printing sequence of the white layers to achieve a cohesive feeling between the final prints, treating luminosity and color separately. In a final step, a clear-coat layer is applied, giving the black the dense richness Tacita wanted and providing an appearance of even further depth and density to each image. 

Jeff McMane

Master Printer & Manager, Screenshop