Beverly Sky
I have only one goal in life which I want to pursue devotedly: it is to make landscapes. Jean Baptiste Corot
I find personal poetry in creating an image of the natural world with natural fibers, using cellulose—the fundamental structure of plant life—to create my own world views. I appreciate the resourcefulness of pulp: the circular energy of life (plant), death (pulp), and reincarnation (paper).
Landscape painting is perceived by the art world as a less-than-edgy subject for contemporary artists. Painting trees is not considered revolutionary artistic activity, but after twenty years as a pulp painter, I still find landscapes my most compelling subject.
When I attempt to capture the atmosphere of a certain place at a certain time and from a certain distance, I experience a connection to my work and to the natural world. I am inspired by places that create a feeling of awe, regardless of how modest the terrain. I am moved by the vibrational qualities of the relationships of color, form, and space. I make watercolor sketches and take photos as mnemonic devices; I return to the studio ready to pulp paint. As I work on them, the trees, mountains, rocks, streams, flowers, clouds, and atmospheres become characters, actors in my own personal life dramas and moods. The woodland scenes, waterviews, marshlands, night skies, glades, and seascapes become the sets.
My interest in fiber arts began thirty-five years ago. I became a tapestry weaver specializing in landscapes. My first piece was a weaving of Paul Bunyan standing next to a large tree and over the next few years I made tapestries of famous trees. The largest of these, a 30" x 40" weaving titled General Sherman's Tree, depicts a giant Sequoia, reputed to be the oldest and largest living plant in the world.
My weavings often took several months to complete and I found it difficult to part with them, so I began to cast about for another medium. I experimented with monoprinting for a few years, but I did not like the toxic solvents and hard colors. In order to incorporate more texture into my monoprints, I took a papermaking workshop in 1981 at Bennington College with Joe Zina, who cofounded Rugg Road Paper Company with Bernie Toale.
I remember walking into the studio and making my first sheet of paper. I was thrilled to use pulp made from fast growing, renewable sources (not trees); cotton, abaca, and mulberry mixed with water and then transformed into a magnificent, thin sheet of paper. When Joe demonstrated pulp painting techniques, I was hooked. Here was a fibrous medium, like tapestry, without the restraints of warp and weft. I could create an image fairly rapidly, compared to the months required to spin and dye my own yarns and work on a loom. Here was a medium that enabled me to pigment and create my own color palette with overbeaten cotton and abaca pulp, to experiment with a variety of viscosities using formation aid, and to incorporate textures and a variety of other papermaking effects quickly and easily into an image. Pulp painting combined for me the most interesting aspects of weaving, printmaking, and painting. I could build up or weave a composition by couching thin layers of colored pulp upon a wet, cast sheet of paper.
Although a wonderfully forgiving and easily learned art form, pulp painting can be challenging in part because the pulp delivery system of applicator bottles makes it difficult to create very fine lines. In addition, the pulp, when wet, is highly color saturated and bright, but dries to about eighty percent of its intensity, even with pearlescent additives. I often feel I am working in the future because I have to anticipate this loss of color intensity in the work.
I use a pointillist technique in my pulp painting; a particular image is made up of bits and pieces of colored pulp that the viewer's eye pulls together into an image. From a distance my works look like complicated watercolors. Up close, one sees a composition of many layers, with small colored sections.
To make a pulp painting, I first cast a large sheet by pouring pulp (50% cotton and 50% abaca) into an aluminum frame. I press this very lightly, to compress the base fibers for greater strength. The first layers of color are thin glazes of pulp mixed with pearlescent powders that I rub into the surface, for greater luminosity. I begin laying in the pulp from the top of the wet sheet down: background, middle ground then foreground at the bottom of the sheet. When I work on a piece, applicator bottles shaking in each hand, the pulp flies everywhere. I try to lay down as many layers of pulp dots and lines as possible, to get depth and dimension into the piece. I often work on a single piece for several days, then press it and dry it under restraint. It is difficult to get very delicate or fine lines with this technique, so I use distant scenes and an impressionistic touch to achieve an integrated perspective.
Every place on earth has a story to tell. Here in New England, there is nothing left of our primordial forests. No ecotourist bus can take us to see the "forest primeval" Longfellow describes in his poem, "Evangeline." Every day the landscape is bulldozed and paved and polluted mercilessly in the name of profit and progress. Whatever paradise the native peoples of our country lived in has disappeared forever from our memory, preserved only in a few paintings and descriptive texts. The precious little forest and open space left needs to be keenly safeguarded. Can a picture of a couple of birches, growing wild in a woodland grove with a carpet of forget-me-nots help? Maybe. Will it be enough to be able to show our grandchildren pictures and pulp paintings of the green and living earth as it is today and say, "This is what it used to look like?" I do not think so, but I am compelled to try to save something of it.
The land reduced to dust, frozen, and then reborn every year, afresh with green and flowered hope: This is what keeps me going into the woods and what holds my interest in painting landscapes. The same view, never the same. And trying to understand the divinity inscribed in every landscape and in myself.