Lee Mullican. This Marvelous Tool

When Lee Mullican found himself one day without a paintbrush, he reached instead for a printer’s knife. At the time he was staying with Jack Stauffacher, a printer Mullican had met while in the Army who ran the Greenwood Press in San Francisco. Borrowing Stauffacher’s “marvelous tool”¹—a knife with a flexible blade used to apply ink to rollers—Mullican developed a distinguished approach to markmaking by adapting the blade’s square tip to apply and score paint, creating abstract forms from linear dashes that resemble geometric glyphs or stitches in textiles.