Uni Papers

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.