Papermaking
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.
