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.