Calla Lily II is one of seven prints in Ellsworth Kelly's Series of Plant and Flower Lithographs, made at Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles between 1983 and 1985 and issued in an edition of thirty. The group takes up three subjects: two philodendrons, three calla lilies, two dracenas. Kelly drew all seven directly on transfer paper in the Gemini studio, working without preliminary studies, as he had for the plant prints he made there in the previous decade. The sheet is upright and narrow, roughly 36 by 25 inches, and the drawing depends on that proportion.

Two lilies rise nearly the height of the paper. Their stems establish a vertical movement that the drawing then interrupts — a bend here, a lean there, one stem passing behind the other. At the top the flowers open into folds and overlapping edges that read immediately as calla lilies and then, held longer, stop reading as anything in particular. The line thickens and thins. In places the lithographic crayon leaves a visible grain; elsewhere the contour is barely there. Nothing else is on the page.

The empty paper is not background. Kelly's contour has several jobs at once: it describes the plant, closes a shape, and divides the sheet into intervals that are themselves shapes. The untouched areas are one of the terms in that division, not the space left over after it. This is the problem he set himself in the shaped canvases and the reliefs, worked out here at a smaller scale and with a single tool.

Kelly had drawn the calla lily before, at length. Eleven of the twelve prints in Twelve Leaves (1978), also made at Gemini, are variations on a single calla-lily leaf seen from shifting orientations. His return to the plant in Calla Lily I–III has little to do with its symbolic freight, which he ignores. What the plant offers is a structure worth turning over: a long sweeping outer edge, a fold that turns the surface back on itself, a point, an enclosure. Variations come easily from it. The habit of working this way runs back through Leaves (1973–74) to the Suite of Plant Lithographs of 1964–66, made when Kelly first took up printmaking in Paris, and behind those to the plant drawings he began in France around 1949. Richard Axsom's catalogue raisonné of the prints tracks the sequence in detail.

What makes the lithograph worth attention is what it records about the passage from looking to abstracting. Kelly did not arrive at abstraction by leaving the visible world; he found it there, in a particular plant on a particular afternoon, and the drawing is the record of the finding. The lily becomes an arrangement of curves, edges, and enclosed intervals whose logic runs straight into the paintings. But lithography keeps something the paintings lose. Because the drawing went directly onto the transfer paper, the printed line still carries the pace of Kelly's hand — the hesitations, the changes of pressure, the point where he lifted off — and the edition repeats that pace exactly, thirty times over.

Other examples of Calla Lily II are held in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Grand Rapids Art Museum. The Grand Rapids impression was included in Drawn from Nature: The Plant Lithographs of Ellsworth Kelly, organized by the museum in cooperation with the artist and subsequently presented at institutions including the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College and Tate St Ives.