My friendship with Golda spanned almost three decades beginning with our early collaborations at Dieu Donné in the mid-1970s. When we first met I was a fresh papermaker new to the art world forming in Soho while she was already a veteran papermaker of 20 years and a native of the New York City art community. Her love of handmade paper began in 1957 in Paris when she first saw etchings printed on Richard de Bas paper. She began purchasing handmade paper in Paris and traveled to the Richard de Bas Mill to acquire more. She continued collecting handmade paper throughout her travels in Europe and took home enough to last for three years of work in her New York City studio. By 1961 Golda's collection of fine papers was depleted and through Anne Ryan, the noted collage artist, she found a new source of handmade paper, Douglass Howell. Rather than just purchase his paper, Golda engaged Howell to teach her how to make paper by hand. Over the course of six weeks, one day a week in his studio in Westbury, Long Island, Howell tutored Golda on making paper in the Western tradition using old linen rags. Although Howell used colored rag pulp as paint and as elements in his sculpture, their sessions focused on sheet forming, not artistic applications of papermaking, nor artistic collaboration. As Golda said, their relationship was student to master, not artist to artist. Handmade paper proved to be ideal for Golda whose paintings incorporated found objects into a textured surface of impasto paint and pulp. Though Golda's subject matter changed over the decades, her early training and friendship with the Abstract Expressionists of her day – Hans Hoffman, Willem de Kooning, Drawing in Shoemaker's Leather #50, 1977, 16 x 26 inches, leather embedded in cotton paper. Courtesy of Robert C. Williams American Museum of Papermaking, Atlanta. Newgrange, 1982, 38 - x 35 inches, cast paper wall relief from Stuyvesant Oval Series (sidewalks of New York). Courtesy of Dieu Donné Papermill, New York. 40 - hand papermaking winter 2005 - 41 and Franz Kline – defined her approach to making images as well as her interest in materials and means of execution. Studying with Douglass Howell whetted Golda's appetite. However, Howell's studio was not available for collaboration and at the time there were no other hand papermaking facilities in the United States. Not deterred, Golda contacted J. Barcham Green in England to help her gather papermaking equipment for her New York City studio. With a lab beater she found in the United States and paper moulds from England she proceeded to refine the papermaking process for her art. Golda's first of many exhibitions worldwide took place in 1963 at the Balin–Traube Gallery in New York City. For the next four decades Golda worked steadily on a body of work, which reveals numerous permutations of a remarkably consistent theme and method. Impressions were drawn from her daily life and rendered in bold, expressionistic strokes. She developed a sculptural approach, carving the paper and kneading the pulp with found objects, which became a signature of her highly textured collages. The sheer physicality of her work stand in marked contrast to the earlier, subtle collages of Anne Ryan. Yet together these two artists helped define a new genre of art closely linked to the hand papermaking process. Receptive to her world of materials and everyday surroundings, Golda was always eager to incorporate her daily experience into her art. As a young artist she used scraps of leather and decorative beads from her day job as a designer to create her images. In later years, the crushed soda cans she found on the streets of Manhattan became abstracted into elements of color, texture, surface, and shape in her late collages. Golda was a close friend of the photographer Aaron Siskind who is known for his black-and-white photographs of close-ups of cracked walls and decaying fragments of printed paper. Using a similar approach, Golda wanted to translate into handmade paper what she saw directly beneath her feet when she walked the concrete sidewalks of New York City. Using many pounds of cotton rag pulp, we built up slabs of "pulp pavement." We then hand molded and pressed, with our feet, irregular sidewalk shapes onto the surface, often adding mud slides of dark, pigmented pulp into the cracks to create dramatic, black-and-white bas reliefs. In all of her work – whether applying colored cotton pulp directly onto a stretched canvas or attaching pulp to the surface of freshly fired ceramics – Golda was irreverent in her unorthodox combinations of materials and methods yet, at the same time, she was deeply aware of their distinct power. In 1999 curator Andrea Honoré and I visited Golda's studio in preparation for an exhibition entitled "Paper Trail" which was presented at Rutgers University in New Jersey. As we viewed a lifetime of Golda's art and her enduring partnership with papermaking, we listened to the stories that each piece held for her of adventures and friendships that ranged back to the heady days of Abstract Expressionism in New York City and into the wider world of Costa Rica, Holland, and Micronesia. The bold and indomitable will so evident in both art and artist at first belied the subtle sensitivity in the work as well as the courage and vulnerability of the artist. Andrea and I watched in disbelief as our petite and engaging hostess carefully lowered herself into a prone position and requested our help in summoning an ambulance. Golda had broken her hip during the studio visit and, like the pro that she was, calmly addressed the situation with intelligence and aplomb. Spirit intact, she rebounded from her hospital stay and, with her usual discipline and thoroughness, prepared new work for her upcoming retrospective in Atlanta. As she said to her friend Mrs. Harry Callahan during their video interview as they toured her exhibition at the Robert C. Williams Museum, "It's an old process, papermaking, but it's what the artist does with it that counts." Golda pioneered this process in the name of art and made it count. above: My Japanese Friend, 1994, 15 x 25 inches, cut and crushed soda cans embedded in cotton paper. Courtesy of Robert C. Williams American Museum of Papermaking, Atlanta. left top: The artist at work on Stuyvesant Oval Series at Dieu Donné Papermill in the early 1980s. Courtesy of Dieu Donné Papermill, New York. left bottom: Paper pulp, pressed by foot, at Dieu Donné Papermill in the early 1980s. Courtesy of Dieu Donné Papermill, New York.