In 1975, while in graduate school at the University of Georgia, Deal was first exposed to papermaking by Professor Charles Morgan. He had a Hollander beater that he allowed Deal and another graduate student to operate, but only under his strict supervision. Deal recalls, “He was an absolute perfectionist. We got to sit around and throw in a couple of linters.” Because the beater was Morgan’s personal equipment, Deal resorted for her own work to using kitchen blenders she found at thrift stores. (She would burn out their motors about every two weeks.) She recycled rag papers from the printmaking shop and cast the paper onto plaster molds. Deal remembers working with other artists on some fairly unorthodox experiments in those early days, such as using RIT dyes for color and Elmer’s glue for sizing. They soon converted to using ground pigments, polymers, and spray matte mediums, for their more archival qualities. After graduate school, Deal worked at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. She was a resident printmaker with the Discover Graphics program at the National Collection of Fine Arts (now the National Museum of American Art). In the late 1970s, the Museum had an exhibit of work from the Appalachian region and Deal encouraged the inclusion of three artists working with paper: Jean Francis, Adrienne Anderson, and Judy Jones.  The Smithsonian was then in what Deal calls “the fat days.” She set up a paper studio for Discover Graphics, with a Valley beater donated by the Institute for Paper Chemistry through the efforts of Arnold Grummer. The Smithsonian’s wood shop made unsophisticated moulds and deckles, suitable for the kind of public programs they were intended for. By 1983, the Discover Graphics program lost its institutional support, and Deal and her colleagues lost their jobs.   After two years teaching art (including papermaking) at Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute in upstate New York, Deal returned to Washington, D.C., to teach at the Corcoran School of Art, where she became head of the printmaking department. Right away she located the papermaking equipment abandoned by the Smithsonian and arranged for the Corcoran to acquire it. The Valley beater is still in use there today, having undergone several upgrades over the years. Deal calls it “the ’57 Chevy of beaters”; while the Corcoran may purchase a new beater some day, they will not give up the Valley. Deal taught papermaking at the Corcoran for about ten years. In the mid-1990s, due to departmental duties and to lighten her load, she turned the class over to her colleague, Lynn Sures. Deal will return to teaching paper again this school year. A sabbatical from May 1999 through August 2000 gave Deal the chance to reexplore paper as a medium. She had made artwork solely with paper pulp up until about 1995: working on a vacuum table, spraying pulps through a pattern pistol, and applying colored pulp from squeeze bottles to a base sheet. By the early 1990s, she found that she could get what she refers to as “luminosity” in traditional monoprints and etchings, something she could not achieve when making images with pulp. So, while still printing on handmade paper, she shifted to making her images solely with inks. Deal maintained her ties to the University of Georgia during the 1990s, teaching several times at the school’s studies abroad program in Cortona, Italy. Cortona was also the first stop during her sabbatical year. On her return to the United States, she decided to visit papermaking and printmaking studios along the East coast, something she had not been able to do for almost ten years because of her busy schedule—teaching and chairing her department at the Corcoran and raising two young daughters. She visited and drew much inspiration from Atlanta’s Nexus Press; Dieu Donné Papermill, in New York City; and the Rutgers Center for Innovative Prints and Paper, in New Brunswick, New Jersey. With the help of two grants, Deal produced a series of work at Pyramid Atlantic, outside Washington. She felt challenged to face her previous disillusionment with paper for making images. Having observed workshops conducted by artists Rick Hungerford and Gail Deery—in which finely beaten pulp was mixed with formation aids to achieve the kind of controlled effects she sought—she knew that more was possible with paper than she had mastered in the 1980s.  With technical assistance from Pyramid Atlantic’s resident papermaker, Nicole Selmer, Deal made drawings on Pellon with mixtures of paper pulp and formation aid. These she transferred onto base sheets. The formation aids allowed many different effects, including very thin, translucent layers of color washes over the sheet. Selmer’s assistance in mixing the pulps and in suggesting how the Pellon could be used was crucial for Deal and Selmer’s printmaking background made their work together much easier. Deal marvels at the use of Pellon for this kind of work. In the 1980s she had used stencils made from Art Core (a stiff kind of Foamcore, no longer made) in her paper work. With the more flexible Pellon, she discovered ways to use the material both for stencils and for templates on which to make drawings. Areas could be blocked out and also drawn onto, with the Pellon used as a plate. As a printmaker, Deal found this a natural way to work (including working on a light table with the image projected in reverse onto the Pellon). Wanting more control than from the squirt bottles she had previously used and the turkey basters and syringes used by others, Deal discovered a variety of specialized   eyedroppers—made in various sizes and with different shaped tips, for medical purposes—that met her needs perfectly. She found she could do very detailed line work easily with the eyedroppers, which she was surprised to find held enough pulp to allow her to draw continuously for several minutes without refilling. She found this fluid way of working very meditative. Deal likes the effect of a ragged line, the kind of uneven edge seen in an enlarged etching or illustration. The combination of drawing fine lines with pulp, transferring these to a base sheet, and then pressing the work achieved just this effect. For the appropriated images she likes to use (ranging from historic engravings to commercial art), this was the look she had sought. In addition to the blurred line, Deal worked with Selmer to replicate other print-like qualities. Pellon is hydrophillic and, if sprayed well with water before the pulp is applied, can give a work very clean edges. In addition, washes with very dilute pulp give a glazed feel. Using these techniques in combination, Deal could get a full range of visual effects in her pieces. Deal calls her latest works “paper monotypes.” With the Pellon templates she could easily edition a series of works or do a set of themes and variations, but she has yet to explore those possibilities. Her next project, work for a joint show with her husband, sculptor Tom Ashcraft, may take the form of a band of tile-like paper pieces with images from Italy. This may lend itself to repeated imagery and, therefore, editioning. But Deal says that “editioning is sort of the antithesis of monoprinting and using the monotype process, although it opens up possibilities.” Deal is visibly excited about these new-found techniques for working with paper pulp to make prints. Her enthusiasm extends to plans for making larger work, perhaps at Dieu Donné Papermill. She also plans to incorporate the techniques into a paper and book arts class she will teach soon at the Corcoran, where the papermaking component would otherwise be pretty much limited to simple sheetmaking. Her return to making images with paper should enrich the field for papermakers and printmakers alike.