Uni Papers

We are no longer surprised when a dozen professional artists, working from the same model or landscape, produce a dozen different works of art. It is taken for granted that your chowder (I base this upon a careful reading of Mrs. Murphy’s famous recipe) will taste unlikethatof anyone else. We recognize, if we travel, the enormous differences in color, bouquet, and taste of the white and red wines offered in every village we visit.

Is there a standard taste for spaghetti sauce? Is there but one reci pe for cu rry? Do you know of only one way to get to Heaven? What is a poem? How does one dance the role of Giselle? Is the unwritten novel running ’round your head the same as mine? How do you produce a first-rate film? Compose meaningful music? Playa jazz piano? Stalk an Arctic char (a fish)?

The act of making handmade paper is not unlike the reactions of the proverbial blind men reacting to an elephant. No matter how closely you follow the recipes contained in this book, no matter how precise your measurements, no matter how carefully you control all of the elements in this capricious process, your paper will not be precisely the same as anyone else’s. There are so many factors involved in this simple but complex, idiosyncratic phenomenon, that the number of permutations and combinations possible in this exercise of esthetic freedom are infinite.

At right is a portrait of the first papermaker. The first papermaker has prevailed on this earth for 300 million years or so, since the middle Coal Age. She belongs to the order Hymenoptera of the family of Vespidae and the super-family, Vespoidea; she is one of more than four million species of insects that buzz, whir, sting, dig, glow, bite, do unusual things, or go bump in the night.

She is a paper wasp who has been engaged in the art of making paper for millions of years; a winged queen of a complex social order who macerates dry wood in her mouth and employs the pulpy result to create a habitat of paper for her empire; her paper structure, or nest, strikes envy in the hearts of contemporary architects and fear in the limbs of small boys and girls.

At this juncture, we are in difficulty -especially if we insist on honesty and objectivity. We are concerned with more than the craft of making paper; we view papermaking, by artists and for artists, as more than a means to an end-rather, as an end in itself and/or a highly artistic craft.

To quote Ruskin, “Nothing is a great work of art for the production of which either rules or models can be given. It is not an art but a manufacture.” We must offer rules or models; many of you wish to use handmade paper for drawing, printmaking, watercolor painting, and sculpture, and each of you viewing handmade paper in a different manner has certain sets of requirements. The following paragraphs, therefore, reveal a series of paradoxes just as do the contributions of practitioners.

Good handmade paper is strong, durable (yet it can also be ephemeral); good handmade paper should shrink uniformly in all directions (but some artists will woo distortion and distress their papers deliberately); ghp (forgive the shorthand here) should lie flat (yet certain artists will revel in making it do otherwise to meet a special need); and ghp should be opaque, if it is to be printed or painted on (and even as this is being written I know that there are men and women who demand the opposite). In addition, ghp holds a watermark well because of its manufacturethe pulp lies over the raised “mark” throughout the making of the sheet providing a translucent image, whereas machine-made paper receives a watermark when a dandyroll is pressed into the wet pulp, compressing it and darkening the image, after the sheet is formed; yet, I know without being aware of his or her name that someone, somewhere, will use the latter technique, sometime, in forming handmade paper-just because. In general, ghp should be receptive to ink or paint and should allow these mediums to dry (I am also certain that someone will create papers that will do otherwise for valid artistic reasons); ghp should reveal a difficult-to-describe texture, surface, and character-qualities that one senses or feels without even touching the sheet (yet, we cannot rule out the possibilities that opposite properties will be sought and integrated into a new whole by some unknown individual).

Thus, paper may be fragile or tough, ephemeral or durable, very soft or very hard, transparent, translucent, opaque, absorbent, abrasive; it may form the walls of houses and resist fire orbe the basis for furniture in all the rooms of an apartment or house; we know it is long lasting (500 years or so in the western world and about 2,000 or so in the east); it can be teabagthin or as thick as an adobe brick; it may serve as scented, personal stationery or as a monumental, rigid piece of sculpture, in which the medium is an integral part of the message.

As mentioned earlier, the specific support on which a drawing, print, or watercolor is made produces a different visual phenomenon than the drawing, print, or painting would make if designed on any other kind or quality of paper.

When considering three-dimensional treatments of paper (when paper is treated as a medium in its own right) the nature of the materials used in making paper, the length of beating time, and other myriad factors enter into complex relationships that guarantee the uniqueness of our own handmade paper. These factors cannot but help influence artistic expression to some degree as we, in turn, bend the handmade paper to our own esthetic ends.

The relationship between figure and ground, between image and its support, between the design and the particular paper cannot but engage the eye actively, as it contemplates the composition.

Thus, the same image on a smooth, shiny, bright paper; on white, off-white, gray, or other colored paper; on heavily textured, coarse, tough paper; or on a highly personalized sheet of your own handmade paper designed to fit that image is a different total image.

Meet a papermaker and you meet a most peculiar person: he or she is bright of eye, clean of hand, and beats neither spouse nor children. Papermakers just beat rags and grow things.

Papermakers are a happy lot, a special group in love with what it does, sharing an incurable, contagious, low-budget, high-fevered, mysterious disease with all friends and acquaintances: papermaking.

What are the symptoms of this epidemic disease? Apocryphal writings have long suggested that a positive correlation existed between the quantity of alcohol an individual consumes and the quality of the paper said individual produces. But even if one is addicted solely to carbonated soft drinks, coffee, or tea, the primary characteristic of the disease is an unquenchable desire to make one sheet of paper, or a work of paper, after another ad infinitum; other evidence includes a sensual pleasure in wearing cotton and linen costumes which, at a moment’s notice, are ripped off one’s back and transmuted to handmade paper. A collector who sorts and labels rags for future use may be suspect; others who admit, albeit reluctantly, that they grow a few acres of flax on the back forty, who dye the flax and put it through a flax break, scutching knife, and board, who whip and comb it through a flax heckle before beating it and turning it into paper are, obviously, hooked for life. People who use a colorful jargon composed of simple, earthy words may be papermakers aborning, especially if the words have meanings other than those shown in standard dictionaries.

Individually, papermakers are male and female artists who can be wedded to either personalized blue jeans or generalized banker’s or engineer’s gray flannel; who either wear no socks or sport the latest fad in leg coverings; who are bemoccasined, booted, or wear made-to-order shoes made in London; who may seem scruffy looking as befits a certain age group or pass as examples of walking dress mannequins; who are technically oriented people dependent on precise equations or free spirits whose attitude to paper formulas and papermaking (and all else) in general is summed up in hunch or intuition -a pinch of this, a smidgin of that. But, it works.

By and large, they are an interesting group, a cross section of all humanity.

If you feel at home with basic tools and materials; if you can follow certain recipes for papermaking knowing, in advance, that your paper will be unique-for reasons that will unfold as we proceed; if it warms your heart to know that you can save yourself many hundreds of dollars by recycling pure rag scraps of paper and matboard, worn-out clothing, and ancient linen tablecloths, then you may, in time, learn to savor the intoxication of pleasure found in papermaking.

If you wish to emulate Rembrandt’s experimental attitudes toward handmade paper (his dissatisfaction with the papers produced by seventeenth-century Dutch paper mills during his lifetime prompted him to buy German, Swiss, Japanese and French papers, and some from East India, as well as the specially treated skins of calves, kids, and lambs, called vellum), you will have to print the same etching, as did he, on many kinds, qualities, and colors of paper to search out and find an appropriate marriage between your image and its support.

Inevitably, you will spoil some sheets. Some of you will spoil many. Solving certain problems will create others. But, that is the way one learns to make paper or space ships. Frustration will not be your lot, unless you seek the perfection of a professional maker of handmade paper only hours after reading this or any other book. Obviously, as with most good things in life, including making love or wine, it takes time, grace, sympathy, and a little tender loving care.

But, if you discover that the purchase of handmade paper is beyond your means, what, if anything, can you do about it?

Doing It Yourself

As in other areas of life, there are those who believe that producing paper for their own artistic purposes would be so time-consuming, so expensive, so enervating, so super-specialized, as to preclude the primal concerns of the artist.

Simon Barcham Green, proprietor of the Hayle Mill in England and “a ninth generation papermaker with a degree in paper science” offers this sober judgment:

“…a professional outlook is essential. The handmade paper mill is a small craft industry. It serves other craftsmen by providing an important material. There is room for artistic papermaking-but not a great deal. So beware of the artycrafty approach; it should not be allowed to obscure the true role of handmade paper: that of a means and not an end in itself. This view will not coincide with that of some good friends making paper by hand in the U.S.A. It is a personal one, but sincerely held, and I hope the implications will cause no offense.” — Green, “Making Paper by Hand at the Hayle Mill in England.” Fine Print, Vol. 2, NO.2. April, 1976, p.18.

This attitude (which I respect) if held by all, would have long since removed certain basic, artistic freedoms from humanity, including the freedom to fall flat on your face when trying something just beyond your reach. It could also have removed the freedom to flounder, and the freedom to succeed. It may seem, at first blush, that I am trying to reinvent the wheel, to fly in the face of generations of knowhow, super-professionalism, technology, and the forward march of the machine. Yet, I firmly believe that an indescribable satisfaction will be yours, can be yours, if you master the simple (of course, it is complex) process of making handmade paper.

Numbers of us, and our little band grows daily in geometric leaps, prefer to manufacture our own materials-when we can-for diverse reasons, including the obvious one of financial savings. We delight in pitting our human resources against, and combining them with, those offered by nature and man to produce that which will serve our needs and standards to meet our various goals. The pleasures derived from making, building, and preparing your equipment, tools, materials, and supplies are truly satisfying.

Many users of expensive papers for drawing, printmaking, and watercolor painting have been deluding themselves for years in believing they have been buying and using handmade papers when, in fact, they have been purchasing mould-made papers (made by machine) containing varying percentages of rag content. (The differences between machine-made, mould-made, and handmade papers will be explained later.)

Show a prospective customer a deckle edge and whisper, “rag content,” and you have a buyeralbeit an ignorant one. Yet, there is nothing wrong with mould-made paper; some of my best prints were and are made on it, and many of my best friends-to overwork an overworked cliche-still use Antique Laid, German Copperplate, English Etching, Arches, Rives BFK, and other mould-made paper for prints, drawings, and watercolors and are delighted with their results. Compare any mould-made paper with handmade, however, and a different story results, which will unfold as we continue.

In the not-too-distant past, there was a plentiful supply of inexpensive handmade paper. Mills employed highly skilled craftsmen to replenish their stocks of paper for sale around the world. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of these old paper mills have closed down, victims of the technological revolution, for lack of young recruits to the craft, rising costs, inflation, and steadily decreasing profit margins.

In 1886, Charles Thomas Davis wrote, “There is now so little handmade paper produced in the United States that a chapter devoted to the details of its manufacture is really of no practical value…” Except for a gaggle of handmade paper mills in various countries, including the United States and Canada, Mr. Davis’ statement still standsthough it appears to be threatened by the present rediscovery of paper and pulp as mediums for artists.

Current economic realities have forced the small number of mills in operation in North America to price their handmade papers at high levels. In defense of present-day costs of handmade paper, here are some observations by Henry Morris, papermaker, printer, publisher, and sole proprietor of the well known and highly esteemed Bird & Bull Press: “Actually, the New York prices of English handmade paper, as late as 1968, were too low to provide a fair return to the mills. I did a little research on the subject of prices and was surprised to learn that when adjusted to real purchasing power, the price of a ream of 20 x 25 inch handmade paper was actually 30 % lower in 1968 than the same ream in 1928. Since 1968 there have been several increases, and using the same yardstick, I believe this paper is now properly priced and includes a sufficient profit for the makers. The question arises as to whether the market will support these prices which, although high, are necessary and reasonable under present-day conditions.” (Morris, “Letter to the Editor.” Fine Print, Vol. 2, NO.2. April, 1976, p. 20.)

Given a choice, professional artists prefer handmade paper to all substitutes. A visit to any historical collection of prints and drawings will bear eloquent witness to the previous statement.

With the possible exception of one of Dard Hunter’s contributions to papermaking, it is difficult to find, in one volume, the complete story of the so-called “white art” for artist papermakers from today’s vantagepoint - unless the reader has access to a major library collection of rare and limited edition books on the subject.

Throughout the centuries, to this very day, people have taken paper for granted. It is regarded as one of the givens of society, as ubiquitous as rain, smog, motherhood, or oleomargarine. Being so obvious, it has long been invisible. If requested to “think paper,” most individuals will meditate on a sheet of white paper. Further, it is widely believed that pure, white paper (as with a certain brand of well-advertised soap) is the omega of papermaking.

How do you define the color, white? What images, what associations come to mind? The albuminous material surrounding the yolk of an egg; the fifth circle of an archery target; the purity and cleanliness of a well-scrubbed, white-enameled kitchen sink; the virgin-whiteness of a wedding gown; great masses of flour, sugar, and snow; Snow White and her seven little men; the white part of the eyeball; hooking a good-sized white bass; the silvery white of the birch; whitecaps on duck-egg blue water; whitewash (political and the Mark Twain variety); white elephants, both literal and figurative; the white-face of mimes and clowns; whitefish (smoked) for Sunday brunch; a White Friar and Whitefriars in Fleet Street, London; the American bald eagle; the white heat of anger and the fear-provoking White Horde; white-hot metal and the 374 foot White Horse of Saxon fame; a certain eighteenth century colonial mansion in Washington, D.C.; Kipling’s unfortunate “white man’s burden”; white nebula and the white noise of electronic music; a Canadian winter white-out; the White Rose of York and White Russians; January white sales and a leaping white (silver) salmon on the Kaniapiskau River; white sauce for madame and a man-eating shark for monsieur; white slavery and white supremacists seen against the background of the White Terror of eighteenth century France; white tie and tails along the Great White Way; Melville’s whale and whitewings (streetsweepers)-to list a doubleclutch of words found in the nearest dictionary. But enough. Let us leave this intriguing digression with the disturbing thought that white, in the eastern world, carries with it vast numbers of associations quite other than western man’s conceptions.