Paper Beginnings

After my initial experimentations with making small sheets of paper in my print studio in 1973, I began commuting to Santa Cruz, California, working in the school Garner Tullis had started, The International Institute of Experimental Printmaking.

There were a number of printing presses in the shop, including a 300-ton hydraulic press which I used for creating some deep embossments on French etching paper and sheets of lead for outdoor prints. There was a Hollander beater in the shop for making rags into paper pulp, and Garner wanted me and several others to see what we could do with paper pulp. Still, nobody knew much about papermaking, but all of us working at the institute started working with cotton pulp in our individual ways. I began working full-time there in 1975. Making paper had become the dominate medium in the shop. I concentrated the pulp and worked it into a sheet much like making a slab with clay. I called this technique, free-casting in which no molds were used. Chuck Hilgar was making large white manipulated sheets from vat moulded pulp, Karen Laubhan was burying fibers in the pulp and exposing them in grids, and Garner was pushing and pressing the pulp into plaster molds. There were many invited artists coming through to work at the Experimental Printmaking workshop and we assisted them. Manual Neri, John Battenburg, Jules Heller, Nathan Olivera, Joe Zirker, Sam Francis, Claire Falkenstein, Fletcher Benton, Ken Noland, and Dan Glavin, to name a few. It was an exciting place to work. Information about hand papermaking was still hard to come by. We struggled with problems of warping, shrinking, bleeding, gradually learning about the material. Somehow, I was introduced to Don Farnsworth, a master printer from San Francisco. He was extremely generous. He knew how paper worked and shared everything he knew about paper chemistry, including the use of retention aid, which allowed me to expand into colored pulps that didn’t bleed. We were primarily working with cotton linter prepared in a 1 1/2lb. Valley Beater. I returned to Santa Maria in 1976 and continued exhibiting and making paperworks using my free cast paper technique. My print studio became a paper studio. I built moulds, deckles, vats, my Maytag mixer, and large resin tables to work on. For the next few years, the artwork was still dominated by an emotional response to the fiber, which was treated more like clay than liquid. I began using a lot more pigment in the pulp. Elaine Koretsky introduced me to abaca fiber in 1979-80. I was awestruck by the way cotton and abaca reacted to light so differently and began to play them off with each other in my work. I began teaching papermaking in 1977, giving workshops for schools and colleges around the country. I continue to lecture and give workshops and demonstrations on specific techniques.