Silkscreen on Watercolor Wash

This is Charlie Callahan at his most distilled and potent — a single sea urchin test, rendered in luminous white silkscreen ink, detonating against a gradient field that moves from deep coastal blue down through pale mist to warm blush sand. The lace-like mandala of the urchin's skeleton seems to hover, almost weightless, as if it has just broken the surface of the Pacific and is still ascending. Every perforated socket and calcified ridge of the test is captured with the precision only silkscreen allows, making this a collector's object as much as an artwork — a limited-edition artifact where craft, concept, and coastal mythology collide. Callahan's sea urchin is not decoration — it is an icon forged over two decades of studio practice in Bolinas. Printed on archival rag watercolor paper, this piece carries the permanence its subject demands: a creature that outlasted earlier mass extinctions, now rendered as a devotional image for a world reckoning with the next one. The hand-inscribed title 'Shrine for th' Living' appears twice in the lower field — once ghosted, once inked — doubling the dedication, insisting on witness. For collectors drawn to work that sits at the intersection of ecological urgency and meditative beauty, this silkscreen is a rare acquisition. Callahan's prints are held in collections across the Bay Area and beyond, and his urchin works have been permanently installed in public spaces and shown at venues from Aqua Art Miami to Marianne Boesky in New York. This piece is both a deeply personal object and a culturally resonant one — the kind of work that appreciates in meaning the longer it lives on your wall.