The German printmaker known as Master ES, among the earliest known print personalities of the fifteenth century, printed in white ink on black paper in imitation of rarified contemporary manuscript illumination. In the late sixteenth century, Hendrick Goltzius often printed his series of woodcuts of gods and goddesses on prepared, hand-colored paper to heighten their modeled form and to add to his innovative imagery. Shortly after, inspired by the example of Goltzius, the Dutchman Hercules Seghers printed on hand-colored papers of varying textures and thicknesses (as well as occasionally printing on linen and other varieties of cloth). In the seventeenth century, at the outset of the great age of etching, Rembrandt van Rijn explored the expressive nature of paper in prints by seeking out diverse sheets for the printing of his images, from a thin japan paper to thicker sheets including vellum. A few minutes spent comparing the various impressions of Rembrandt’s Three Crosses in the print room of Washington's National Gallery of Art would provide a revelation in the differences the choice of paper can produce. Rembrandt’s particular genius was to recognize the subtle way in which the color, texture, and absorbent qualities of the paper could effect the presentation and reception of his imagery.  Two centuries later Rembrandt’s greatest printmaking disciple, James McNeill Whistler, sought out exotic contemporary and older European papers in London bookstores and rummaged through the antique stalls of Venice looking for unprinted endpapers. He appreciated the sizing as well as the aesthetic appeal of these sheets. The revival of handmade paper in the second half of the twentieth century and the concurrent development of hand papermaking as a creative art in its own right have led to an eruption of interest in the use of handmade paper in printmaking. Hand Papermaking’s sixth portfolio in its ongoing series is devoted to innovative printmaking on handmade paper. Artists were invited to submit ideas for creative ways in which handmade paper could be integrated with contemporary printmaking to produce novel and compelling results. The eminent jurors, Claire Van Vliet and Gail Deery, selected twenty entries, including a number of collaborative ventures, based upon detailed proposals and examples of prior work in paper and printing. The artists approached the challenge with industry, inspiration, and thoughtfulness, fashioning a handsome array of prints on handmade papers that illuminate some of the many possibilities in combining these two creative disciplines.  The artists explored a broad range of aesthetic possibilities, matched by their employing an array of techniques to develop those ideas. Ideally, each work would comprise at least one print technique and handmade paper that would mutually reinforce their respective expressive potentials. Each work was conceived of as an individual entity, with neither suggestions from the organizers for specific subjects or techniques, nor collusion among the artists as to the nature of their entries.  Despite the diversity of the work, a few generalizations may be made about the collection. Some of the works are simple and direct with explicit content, while others are complex rebuses of signs, marks, and symbols, inviting multiple interpretations. Most of the prints fall into a number of traditional categories. Seven of the twenty works depend upon text for an important component of meaning and design. Almost none of the writing was hand done; most of it was generated digitally or applied through some photo-mechanical process. (In fact, little plate handwork is evident throughout the portfolio.) Another significant group of artists explored aspects of nature, landscape, and the environment. These prints were among the most conventional in design and composition, often forthright and eloquent. Likewise the three prints containing references to the human figure contain both explicit information as well as implicit content. Virtually none of the prints were politically charged, which is somewhat surprising considering the stressful state of the world while the prints were developing. Rather, these artists seem to have responded to the anxiety of war and the unstable global environment by focusing on more transcendent elements of the human condition. A number of prints utilize appropriated images from historical and contemporary art and culture, juxtaposing elements to evoke associations beyond the mere repetition of motifs. Some of the collages resonate with deeper meaning, while others assemble their flotsam into playful and pleasing designs. Many of the artists in the portfolio wrote about how their imagery was inspired by memories and the past, and how the handmade paper and the imagery forms layers in which these embedded memories were gradually uncovered, in a manner reminiscent of an archaeological exploration. Only two of the prints in the portfolio are non-representational.  These printmakers employed both traditional and cutting-edge techniques. The majority of the prints were executed using relief processes, including woodcut, wood engraving, linoleum cut, and photo-polymer plates. Relief printing processes, being impressed into the paper, are particularly well suited to the often uneven variations in the thickness of handmade papers. In contrast, a smooth, even surface is most conducive to lithography and intaglio printing, and fewer artists utilized these techniques. Computers and digitally generated images were also used in the construction of a number of print matrixes.  The papermakers availed themselves of all types of fabrics and vegetable matter in the composition of their pulp, collected from both exotic ports of call and local thrift shops. Inventive techniques for making paper were used, in growing, gathering, collecting, drying, macerating, soaking, processing, mixing, buffering, dying, forming, couching, burnishing, and finishing the handmade sheets. (The processes are painstakingly described by the artists in their portfolio descriptions; readers should refer to the individual statements for these details.) The resultant papers range from smooth and razor thin to thick and toothy; from those papers that contain obvious fibers to others that conceal their component elements. Some of the papermakers painted with pulp on top of the base sheet, creating meaning from the print techniques as well as through the paper substrate. The prints range in color from monochromatic to subtle to lush, variegated hues. All of the prints were bled, and most have deckled edges, although a few have been cut to a straight edge for a particular effect. Only one is irregularly shaped. Roughly one third of the prints are text dominated. Most often the text accompanies an image, as it does in Denise Brady’s Christena, Christina. The text is a poem Brady wrote for her mother’s eighty-fifth birthday, expressing some of her preoccupation with her mother’s health and happiness. Brady juxtaposes the text with a digitally produced photograph of her mother as a young girl, on a paper made from a cotton thermal blanket, a metaphor for her mother’s depression era recycling of spent objects. A light wood grain overlays the image except around the text. The grain and the image complement the homespun imagery of the poem.  Shawn Sheehy’s Making Instruments from Bird Skeletons was also inspired by a poem. Stephen Frech's text warns about the violation of nature through the misappropriation of sacred objects. The music produced by blowing through the bones of dead birds is a metaphor for man’s often sinister effect on the environment. The image of a broken bird skeleton and the superimposing of birds in flight underscore Frech's message. Sheehy wanted the paper to reinforce the elements of death and decay, so he allowed the flax fiber to ret (ferment) rather than cooking it. Although some texts carry an essential message, as in Brady and Sheehy’s prints, in other cases the text becomes the image and the applied design of the lettering outweighs comprehension of the passage. Lynn Amlie and Jon Lee’s evocation of a medieval manuscript illumination is inspired by their affection for historical printing and papermaking. Their paper, made using an antique laid mould and hand burnished, attempts to replicate the feeling and color of old Italian sheets. The paper has a photo-lithographed image of a hand-scribed page from the collections of the University of Iowa printed onto the front of a folded quarto folio. The text, in Latin, is partly obscured by a covering of thin Asian paper, a metaphor for the artists' concept that although few people can read the old text, manuscripts continue to influence design today by their visual appeal. Capital letters were then letterpress printed in red onto the Asian paper, creating a strong abstract element. The paper itself has a delicate, parchmentlike surface. The color and texture of the paper harmoniously blend with the balanced composition to create a pleasant design. Although not integral to the appreciation of the print, it would be interesting to know the meaning and source of the text in the image.  In contrast, Evelyn David and Melanie Yazzie collaborated on a print that is explicit in its use of text. Their contribution proclaims their mutual friendship and collegiality as women who love papermaking and printmaking. David produced the irregularly shaped, watermarked paper while Yazzie was responsible for the print. The paper is a combination of raw cotton fibers and Manila hemp, references to the cotton fields of Yazzie’s native Arizona and to David’s origins in the Philippines. The screen printed text derives from e-mail sent between the artists—they chose screen printing because it symbolized the straightforward and unpretentious nature of their friendship. Encoded in their text is an additional underlined message intended for women artists: “we are here yes speaking to you listen.”  John Risseeuw’s entry, a two-sided print, is dedicated to the legendary jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker. This letterpress print includes quotes by the musician as well as titles and lyrics from Parker’s songs, arranged to evoke the rhythms and improvisations of jazz and bebop. Risseeuw deliberately employed fibers from raw cotton and jute sacks in his pulp, evoking Parker’s roots in black history by using materials associated with slavery. Fibers from saxophone reeds appear randomly throughout the edition as a parallel to the seemingly arbitrary repetition of passages in jazz. The artist used polymer relief plates to print the metallic image of a saxophone on the left side of the print, most easily recognized in raking light.  In many ways the most intricate of the text-oriented prints is that of the Italian-American printmaker Roberto Mannino. Mannino’s work is process oriented, exploring the expressive potential of interaction between papermaking and other forms of visual creativity. The Italian title of his portfolio piece, la superficie delle cose nasconde grandi altezze, can be translated as “the surface of things hide great heights.” The heavily embossed phrase refers to the complexity of iconographic depth in the multiple layers of papermaking and printmaking. Other Italian phrases, printed in relief or intaglio, only some of them easily readable, constitute an integral element of his meaning in this print. Acque cheta fete is an Italian expression that means “still water rots,” a multiple allusion to the artist’s environment. On the most mundane level it refers to the need for the papermaker to fully agitate the water before pulling a sheet, but it can also be read as an admonition to the artist to use his paper stocks quickly and to remain industrious. Other phrases are obscured by overprinting and multiple layers of pulp, effectively burying their meanings.  Subjects drawn from the environment dominate one group of the portfolio prints, from detailed explorations of minute phenomena to more elaborate treatments of landscape. Stephen Fredericks and Megan Moorhouse collaborated on an elegant depiction of a dragonfly embedded in a fossil layer matrix. Fredericks rendered the image in a combination of hard and soft-ground etching. His drawing of the dragonfly’s thorax blends imperceptibly with the soft-ground impression of its intricately patterned wings. The dragonfly is simultaneously fixed as a fossil and soars against the subtly colored paper carrier. Moorhouse created the paper using cotton linter for the base sheet and finely beaten linen rag for the pulp-painted area, producing a paper color evoking Chinese porcelain. The embossed dragonfly in the lower corner (Fredericks' signature stamp) adds to this simple, yet effective work.  Lee Running’s image of birds in a tree is similarly restrained and understated. Running employed a watermark to produce the tree, based on 1920s art deco wallpaper, overlaid with an image of birds printed in transparent inks from a linoleum block. The color of the raw, unbeaten flax fibers and the thin, brittle paper reinforce the fragility of the ghostlike image. The result is an effective work of great purity and restraint.  Susan Mackin-Dolan depicts burnt and dead trees as symbols of change and impermanence in her submission, Another Circle of Trees. Her crisp, black relief line represents the bark and the texture of the trunks, whether partially submerged in water, blackened by fire, or in the built-up pulp framework of logs surrounding the central vignettes. Her four relief blocks, employed to apply seven layers of transparent lithographic color, all but obscure the color of the base pulp sheet. Lynn Sures created the only traditional landscape in the portfolio, a print inspired by her travels through western Scotland. She shows us a great hill, with rises and deep furrows, and an animated, undulating terrain in the foreground. Not a factual record, the intaglio print is the accretion of memories, photographs, and site drawings done during her trip. The end result has what the artist calls a “wistful vagueness” that speaks to the issues of what we remember, what we forget, and what we retain, the evocation of a time and place that goes beyond the actual appearance of a particular location.  Not Always So, a print by Jean Gumpper and Tom Leech, also invokes the role of landscape as a metaphor for emotion, memory, and experience. Leech, responsible for the paper, wanted to capture the tone of a morning sky. For the artists, the image of light, raindrops, and leaves falling on a pond was conceptually paralleled by the carving of the block, the pochoir stenciling, and the layering of paper and ink. The plunging silhouettes of cars pochoired onto the surface bring a startling mechanical note into the otherwise tranquil natural world, perhaps a metaphor for traveling through rather than being a part of nature. The layering of the various media is given added meaning by the relief lettering of the title into the print. As explained in text on the verso of the print, the phrase is from an ironic statement by Shunryo Suzuki Roshi, “The secret of Zen is in just two words: not always so.” Several of the prints contain visual references to the human figure, either as component parts or in a narrative scene. Cynthia Thompson’s Conceal is the most explicit, a digitally-created image of the artist's bare chest, covered by hands appropriated from images of Adam and Eve. In her essay, the artist describes her intention to use the body to explore “the physical manifestations of denial, shame, and oppression.” The thin, translucent, flesh-colored sheet morphs into human flesh as she explores issues of appearance, vulnerability, and guilt. Ironically, the photomechanical process combines with the power of the imagery to approach the edge of salaciousness.  Amanda Degener and Susan Nees explored different psychological issues in their collaborative print. Inspired by the folk art of Mexico and the southeastern United States, their work investigates the presence of unpredictability in the human environment, weighing the issue of fate versus the idea of divine intervention. The print invites the viewer to decipher the meaning of the various details, including the juxtaposition of the hands, book, and birds above the tree limb, and the eyeless angel, serpent and cross below. Many of the vignettes are overtly religious. The emphasis on eyes—some wide open, others absent, one aflame—are clearly allusions to vision and perception. As the print developed, the artists realized that too much of the paper surface was covered by the tone of the woodblock, so Nees reduced the block by cutting away non-essential details. The only other narrative print in the portfolio is Margaret Prentice’s color linocut End of the Day. The action of the scene, however, is deliberately ambiguous. Three men climb from a boat onto a fragile wooden structure, temporarily secure from the dangers of the water below. Prentice is interested in water's inherent power not only to sustain life but to threaten survival as well. She suggests that while the wooden platform provides a transitory haven, eventually the men must return to the boat and confront the forces of nature and their own fear, or else they will perish. The strong, clean marks of the linoleum blocks are reinforced by the rich coloration of the pulp in both the water and the sky. Prentice used Japanese tools to cut the image, which shows the influence of Japanese woodblock prints in the flat, decorative patterns of the design. Some of the portfolio prints defy easy categorization. Peter Sowiski’s Bomber Identity contains the silhouette of a B-52 bomber against a grid, partially obscured by a large amorphous black shape that dominates part of the composition. Only after reading Sowiski’s description of his project are we aware that each of the one hundred and fifty images in the portfolio edition are different, and that pieced together they would form the silhouette of the bomber itself. His combination of intaglio, relief, screen printing, watermarking, and color pulp stenciling yields a cryptic image that refers to his fear and fascination with weapons in this anxious time.  As opposed to Sowiski’s Bomber Identity, the only political print in the set, Frank Brannon’s contribution is intended as a purely decorative work. Using water-based inks, Brannon screened a hanabishi diamond pattern onto paper made from cotton rag and abaca. The edges of the paper are cleanly cut to reinforce the geometry of the design, as opposed to the deckle edge found on most of the portfolio's prints.  Giselle Simon’s print shares some of Brannon’s concerns with geometry, but is at the opposite end of the artistic spectrum in emphasizing the handmade marks in and upon the paper. Her hand-printed, abstract image contains watermarks within the pulp layers and pulp painting layered on the surface. What appears at first glance as a rigid grid pattern of white circles is actually a series of irregular shapes conveying, in their organic forms, a strong sense of hand crafting.  Several of the artists selected for the portfolio appropriated images from history or contemporary culture to add meaning to their works. Georgia Deal’s print is a pulp-painted collage, using images extracted from old engravings. She likes to juxtapose the soft edges of freehand drawings, here the yellow hearts, with the sharper delineations of the older images, such as the key and the drinking monkey. Her prints contain vague references to the past, as well as allusions to personal history. Carmon Colangelo and Rick Johnson’s playful Double Duck Buddha is replete with images of religious icons, cartoon figures, ethnographic references, and exotic coins. Colangelo shamelessly combines these appropriated images with his own drawings, willfully distorting their context and meaning. The artists then digitally printed the image directly onto Johnson's handmade paper, adding the gloss of technology to the amalgam of Colangelo’s cross-cultural references.  Joe Sander’s Island Time manifests an altogether different approach to collage, a more consistent use of related images to explore a specific theme. His work revolves around an interest in navigation and maritime themes. Island Time is composed of appropriated printed images of ocean life, a marine compass, a nautical chart, and printed coordinates for latitude and longitude. A large calligraphic “X” is printed over the undersea plants and terrain that dominate the lower tier of the image. The letter refers to the famous buried treasure maps where “X” marked the spot. A wave pattern along the lower edge adds to the sense of the marine environment. Sanders printed using photo-polymer relief plates on paper that he made from cotton linter in combination with sea grasses that he harvested on Dog Island off the Gulf coast of Florida. The bold coordinates across the image are those of Dog Island, adding an additional significance to the "X" marking. Hand Papermaking's latest portfolio comprises prints executed in diverse techniques on aesthetically vital handmade papers. The very making of the paper itself functions as a metaphor for the imagination, thought, and labor that is involved in the production of the works. The melding of historic and contemporary print techniques with the ongoing development of artistic papermaking here yields a significant aesthetic achievement. Notes 1. Fritz Eichenberg, The Art of the Print: Masterpieces, History, Techniques (New York: Harry Abrams, Inc., 1976). Linda Hults, The Print in the Western World: An Introductory History (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996). A. Hyatt Mayor, Prints & People: A Social History of Printed Pictures (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1971).