The Papermaking process
Papermaking is a fine craft, also a worldwide industry of large corporations, and, for me, a medium for expression. I started by making my own paper for deep embossed prints I made in the early seventies. I recycled scraps of French rag paper left over from some large editions. What a thrill, that first sheet. I knew little about paper then, but it was a start. I stopped making prints as my primary art form a few years later when the paper itself became the object.
Most paper is made from cellulose fiber obtained from one or more of the following sources: bark, wood, seed fiber, grass, fibrous leaves, or woven cloth. It is usually cooked and usually beaten, but not always. Various fibers and their preparation yield vastly different types of paper, yet the same fiber prepared differently can also produce a different kind of paper. The papermaker’s job is to design a suitable paper for his end use using his knowledge of materials and techniques.
Although I make some paper in the traditional way with a vat of pulp, using a mould and a deckle, my main interest when I was starting out was using the pulp much like clay, laying out thick flat slabs of earth-colored pulp on plastic surfaces and manipulating them while they were wet, then left to air dry. This process I named free-casting—the pulp I cast without a mold. I added new pigments and different fibers to my repertoire in the next several years, and pouring and laminating techniques of pulp manipulation have developed since then.
Fiber
The paper I make for my artwork is from cotton, a seed fiber, abaca, from the stalk of a specific banana tree, and kozo, from the bark of a mulberry tree. I have found that different fibered papers reflect and absorb light in dissimilar ways, so I combine dissimilar fibers to take advantage of these inherent qualities when building an art piece of paper. The pulp is prepared by mixing the fiber in water in various mixers or beaters in the studio. The pigment is added to The natural pulp in the mixer. These batches are, in turn, intermixed to a specific hue. Having more than fifty colors mixed in a particular artwork is not unusual.
Then, on large flat surfaces in the studio, the colored pulps of various types are manipulated, and the art piece is built step by step. Sometimes, large 48-60-inch sheets are poured and collaged together so that the finished piece is multiple layers of multi-colored, multi-fibered sheets. All these various techniques are just tools to build a pattern of reflected light and document my visual ideas in colored paper.
PERSONAL DISCOVERIES OF LIGHT AND PAPER
I was invited to participate in the Papermaking USA show organized by the American Craft Museum in New York in 1982. I used my “free-cast” technique to make the piece “Heavens Ladder,” a four-foot by eight-foot sheet of alternating abaca and cotton stripes, and this time using a subtle gradation from white to light ochre. I found a value shift in the abaca portion produced a change of focus in the piece and created a glow within the cotton field of color just as the original tablets seemed to float because of its reaction to the translucent abaca. I continued to work with these simple earth-tone striated pieces for several more years.
I have always used artists’ grade dry pigments for color. I switched suppliers in 1984, and with many more pigments available, I started using more saturated colors in my paperwork. I began using several different color fields within one piece. At this time, I realized I could create hidden images within the pieces. I started to create patterns with the cotton and abaca pulps that would appear and disappear as the viewer moved past the piece. One of these works was the ladder piece “Descending Angel,” which was chosen for the show Poetry of the Physical and put together by Paul Smith, director of The American Craft Museum. The show toured museums in the United States for several years.
One of the most ambitious projects, “Near is Far and Far is Near,” is shown here. It is a five-foot square work completed in 1989, built with patterns that drift in and out as the light changes. The entire piece is a series of hidden images.
