As a student at the College of Creative Studies, University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) in 1970, I painted in oils on canvas for my art classes and made little books illustrating the poetry of Yeats, Eliot, and Lawrence for my literature courses. In 1973, pregnancy prompted me to work exclusively with fumeless, water-based media on paper. I entered UCSB's Graduate program in 1975. Collage artist William Dole was my mentor. Paper continued to be infinitely more tractable than canvas to the nuances of color and texture, light and depth. Instead of regarding the ground as a neutral surface on which to make a picture, I began to see surface and image as two inseparable parts of a whole.    I tore fragments out of my larger watercolors and puzzled these shards of paper together. I found that making collages was far more surprising and engaging than painting. By the end of 1977, I was working solely with collage, using water-based paints, powdered pigments, fabrics, and a variety of papers, some of them handmade. During trips to the US Southwest, I gathered oxides and ochre from the mountains and began to burnish earthen pigments into rag paper. I painted abstractions from rock formations stained with desert varnish, oxides that leeched out of sandstone formed during the Triassic. I continue to use powdered minerals, pigments, and handmade papers today. I refer to maps, geology, and the art and myths of antiquity, probing the connections I find among human and earthen, the shared nature of our chemistries.    Dole used to say that it took ten years to learn anything and then another ten to know what to do with what you learned. Occasionally he would give me a sheet of handmade Fabriano or Magnani paper and I kept it like a treasure, never thinking of using it in my work. From 1974-1980 I used Arches or Rives cover and inexpensive varieties of hosho paper, which I would stain, sand, drench, saturate with pigment, tear, and layer. I constructed collages that connected me to rhythms of the land or the cadences of jazz.    Until 1978, largely through my own ignorance and lack of exposure, I was unimpressed with most of the handmade paper I had seen. It looked like cardboard-thick, super-absorbent paper toweling, often tinted a peachy color with all sorts of debris in it.   Chuck Hilger first introduced me to making paper by hand, as a keen observer but not as a participant. He demonstrated for me his invention, a vacuum press that allowed him to cast giant sculptural pieces in his Santa Cruz, California studio. Although we talked about collaborating, I have never had the pleasure.   In the early 1980s I attended a small workshop held at the home of Harry and Sandra Reese. The Reeses make rag papers onto which they print exquisite letterpress and hand-bound editions of poetry and prose, under the imprint Turkey Press. Harry invited author and paper artist Sukey Hughes, who was living in Santa Barbara, to teach the workshop with him. Harry taught Western techniques and Sukey, Asian. In the Reese's backyard we set up vats and boards for making and drying sheets of paper, and this was the first time I actually got my hands wet.   Sukey had gone to Japan in the Summer of 1969 as a writer and wound up apprenticing with Gotoh Seikichro for nine months. The result was Hughes's publication of the landmark text, Washi: The World of Japanese Paper, in 1978.    Working with Sukey permanently changed how I related to my materials. Time slowed down. My exuberant expressionist tendencies had to make room for carefulness. We boiled the fibers, then cleaned and pounded them into a pulp, the air redolent with a caramelized, woodsy scent. Before I pulled my first sheets of gampi and mitsumata, I watched the clouds of fiber disperse in a vat of cool water, how they spiraled like weather patterns when my hands stirred counter-clockwise to distribute the flocs before dipping the mold into the vat. I felt the smack of a vacuum as the mold broke through the surface tension of the water. I brushed the sheets gently onto lightly waxed plywood boards, and in this fluid state they all but disappeared into the wood. Later, as I peeled the bone dry paper off the board and laid the imperfect sheets in a humblingly small pile that represented three days' work, I gained a new respect for papermakers and determined to learn more about the art.    I came to understand that my passion rested with the way an idea is traced: the process, the unfolding, the return. While forming sheets, my mind seemed to empty out as I moved the screen level with the earth, in all four directions, mesmerized by the waves of water striping one way and then the other. During this time I knew I was working on the silent underpinnings of a future series, getting to know the sheet as it was forming.    Each sheet of paper I made was imbued with the memory of its making. As I laid them out on the floor, my preferred working place in the studio, I discovered that each sheet, flawed as any amateur's, had a voice, which often stubbornly defied being painted on. I decided to incorporate my paper as single elements into collage, feathery deckles and all.    Dole died in 1983 and I inherited several sheets of his paper and jars of powdered pigments. It took me almost ten years to know what to do with the paper and the pigments. In an exhibition in conjunction with a Dole retrospective at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (1992), I made a series called Dialogues in which I used Dole's papers, the papers I had made by hand at Sukey's studio, and paper my daughter had sent me. Dialogues is about silent conversations and the letting go of precious materials. The contextual significance of these papers far outweighed their aesthetic value. By expending these materials, something was released in me that allowed me to start using beautiful papers more generously in my work.    Ten years ago I began traveling extensively while on assignment with my husband, photographer Macduff Everton. In Mexico City I met Juan Manuel de la Rosa, who was making paper from indigenous materials and who kindly provided me with a source for cochineal and indigo. I sought out new sources of handmade paper, particularly as I traveled to India, Mexico, Nepal and Japan.    I continued to work with Sukey, who had moved to New Mexico. With great pleasure I was able to make a small contribution to the art of making paper by focusing on the one most tedious aspect of the process, pounding pulp. Sukey, a calm, meditative woman, knelt on a shoji mat before a small bread board with mallets in each hand. Before joining her, I put on a cassette tape and a flood of Spanish flamenco music filled the room. We pounded with a staccato-percussive fervor to the exhortations of Celia Rodriguiz and the strumming of Manitas de Plata. Pulp never got such swift and boisterous attention!    For me, making paper was never an end in itself. My paper was flawed, but the deformities were an asset because surface texture played such an important part in my collages. I had often used the metaphor of shedding and growth in my writing and painting and this gave me an idea. Snakes shed their skin each spring. A friend saved some skins for me and I used them, in 1994, in making paper. At first I tried with frustration to position them on the screen, but they would not stay in place. Instead, I simply allowed the skins to find their own place, as I dipped the mold twice into the vat. I had no idea what my end product would be. At that moment I was purely a conduit for the paper that I made. This series, Culebra, confounded me. I am trained to do something to the paper but in this, the paper is the piece.    Certain places Macduff and I have visited have touched a core in me and many painting series have been influenced by them. However, I felt torn between traveling and being in the studio. It was impossible to do any work while on the road. Journal notes became the thread that linked me to the studio. Finally it dawned on me that I could work an accumulation of writing and images into book projects.    My first editioned book was Old Marks, New Marks, a chapbook of writing and painting that linked my work to one source of inspiration, the Paleolithic images from the caves I had visited in the Dordogne, France. With help from Sandra Reese, I constructed clamshell boxes using cloth and paper over boards. Inside I placed an original handmade paper collage and the chapbook I had designed.    Only with my second limited edition book did I learn about the production aspects of papermaking. A three week trek through the volcanic landscape of Iceland inspired two painting series and a book of poetry and prints. I used the jars of pigment I had inherited from William Dole to make large paintings on Stonehenge paper. I bombarded the paper surface, sprinkled with pigment, with a watery binder: my own studio-sized volcanic explosions. I made contact monoprints on handmade kitakata paper from these larger paintings and coupled eleven images with excerpts from my journals.    This unique book was the basis for Island: Journal From Iceland. I needed to find a translucent paper that I could print on but that was not brittle like vellum. I wanted each folio to have text printed on the front with the image showing through from the inside page. Inge Bruggeman, printer and bookbinder, agreed to print the text and introduced me to a young graduate student, Rie Hachiyanage, who had studied with Timothy Barrett and was then a student of Harry Reese. Under less than ideal conditions and with fervor, dedication, and strong forearms, Rie made nine hundred sheets of beautiful overbeaten abaca paper. In order to make the paper for this project, Rie encouraged the UCSB Art Department to install a filtration system and purchase materials for drying large runs of handmade paper. This equipment enhanced the department's burgeoning book arts and paper making programs. Rie was helped by Gail Berkus, who was learning how to make paper and who had helped me construct the Old Marks, New Marks boxes, as well as the chemise covers for Island.    Old Marks, New Marks provided an entree to yet another book arts project. The French Minister of Culture responded to my chapbook by inviting me to visit the real cave at Lascaux in May 1997. (I had seen the well-constructed facsimile in 1995.) In the real cave, the color was vivid and fresh, surpassing all of my expectations. Animals seemed to bleed out of the walls. Reds and ochres wove in and out of tarry black outlines. Inside, I felt as if I were within a steep-walled clay vessel, gyring on a potter's wheel. I made a series of drawings, improvisations in ochre pigment burnished onto handmade Torinoko paper, based on the plan-view map of the cave. I also applied ochre over Torinoko paper to construct the cover for my third book, Scratching the Surface: A Visit to Lascaux and Rouffignac.    I produced a unique book consisting of six folios of handwritten text and six dry pigment paintings on kozo and abaca paper half pigmented with ochre. Using the same pigments as our forbears painted with more than twenty thousand years ago was like rubbing shoulders with an ancient past. Based on the unique book I produced an edition of ten, each containing six original paintings. I felt that this would be an intimate enough project that I could do all aspects of the book myself, save the letterpress printing, which I left to Inge.    I had tried to produce the paper at home, using abaca fiber Gail Berkus and I had overbeaten in her Hollander. The porridge-like slurry took twenty minutes per sheet to drain! It puckered, wrinkled, and caught the rain of an endless El Nino storm. I just gave up and let it happen. I made the weirdest, rain-spit paper I had ever seen, yet there was an uncanny beauty to it. Certainly some interesting work can come out of mistake and mishap.    While I could use it for other projects (I later made drawings based on Cycladic figures on it), this paper would not do for my edition. I needed a work space that was equipped to manufacture and dry uniform sheets, so I reserved three days at Dieu Donné Paper Mill in New York City and worked with Pat Almonrode. Following my specifications, Pat prepared a mixture of abaca and kozo pulp that I then pigmented, using a marvelous color-testing method employing a mini-screen concocted from a plastic deli container. Pat fitted an 18" x 24" mold with a foam-core divider so I could pull two 11" x 17" sheets at once. We found a rhythm of working, one pulling and the other couching, then switching, that was unbeatable. We made over three hundred sheets in two obsessive days and I had a third day to experiment with pulp painting and free-form construction of paper pieces.    I approach each project knowing that the material itself will seduce me, and that the methods I employ, whether doing production work or experimenting with individual sheets of paper, will help to define and determine the steps toward a finished piece. The idea of working solely with pulp to make art now fascinates me. I will return to Dieu Donné this year, again reminded of Dole's dictum about the time it takes to learn. Every time you make paper is like the first time you make paper, but when you are in love, twenty years passes like an instant.

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