The Jewish artist Ben Shahn (1898-1969) was born in Lithuania and went to the USA as a child. At fourteen he was apprenticed to a lithographer's shop, where his training included endless drawing of the alphabet until the forms were good enough to be printed. The discipline and craft learned then stayed with him. This design is based on the letters of the Hebrew alphabet - a similar design was used for the cover of his book The Alphabet of Creation, after a 13th-century text that celebrates the divine origin and mystic value of letters. The balance of black and white recalls his workshop training, which stressed the importance of space around the letters as well as the shapes themselves. Serigraphy is different from screenprint in that rather than using a stencil on the screen the artist paints directly and un-'guided' onto the screen.