"That's because most people haven't seen fine handmade paper," says artist and printmaker Donald Farnsworth. "Paper's been around for two thousand years, but it hasn't been part of our experience in this country." His partner, papermaker David Kimball, adds, "The Industrial Revolution put American and European hand papermakers out of business, and it's only been in the last few years that we've seen a growing interest in paper as art, and as a medium for art."
In 1875, Harper's Magazine reported that handmade paper was "extinct in Europe and America, "a victim, like so many other artisan crafts, of the machine age. But some paper champions never got the message, and just a few years ago a whole new generation of artists and art lovers began to rediscover handmade paper. Farnsworth and Kimball found themselves in the vanguard of that first wave. Starting ten years ago, they have alternately led and ridden the swell to their present prominence. Magnolia Editions, their current papermill, printshop, and gallery, is now one of the country's major paper centers, where David Kimball makes fine paper the traditional way while Don Farnsworth and a small crew of printers work with artists on a variety of flatbed transfer presses -- rumbling stacks of steel rollers that turn visions into images, one color at a time.
It all happens in an old brick warehouse on Magnolia Street, in the grimy maze of west Oakland's industrial yesteryear. The sprawling, sunny space has the eclectic clutter common to working ateliers everywhere, and then some. Every available patch of wall has a print or some other paperwork on it. Rock 'n' roll from invisible speakers high overhead kicks a backbeat into the steely growl of the presses. Lean and lanky in a printer's apron, Don Farnsworth watches the press roll down the bed and back again, inking a piece of David Kimball's paper with an image created by British artist Hassel Smith, who looks on anxiously. As the rollers pass, Farnsworth snags the big sheet by its corners and holds it up to the light, ink gleaming. "Good registration," he comments. "Is that pretty much how you saw it?" "No," says Smith. The birth of a lithograph is a long and arduous process; the image is built up color by color, layer by layer, with endless cleaning of inky rollers between trials. The production ends up costing $8,000 to $10,000. Single prints from the limited edition can retail for thousands.
"We publish several different ways," says Farnsworth. "Somebody may walk in off the street, give us eight thousand dollars and walk away with their prints. An artist may come in and we may like their work enough to say: 'Look; you pay half and we'll pay half, and split the profits.' Or we may publish altogether, cover all the costs and split the money sixty-forty." Most of the prints Magnolia sells directly go to art dealers.
If the presses are the pulse of Magnolia Editions, its heart is the much more tranquil wing devoted to David Kimball's papermill. There, amid vats filled with various kinds and colors of pulps, Kimball practices a two thousand year old art.
David Kimball prefers using kozo in his papermaking. Stocky and rawboned, with a hard jaw, easy smile, and a deliberate way of moving on the job, Kimball is the picture of a Yankee artisan. His work space is cool, with a clean, vaguely sweet scent of natural paper pulp. Big areas of floor space are taken up by equipment: an eight foot vacuum table, a forty-ton hydraulic press, and three Hollander beaters.
To make a single sheet of paper, Kimball first swishes a bare arm in a vat of electric blue kozo pulp. Then he dips a wooden mold and deckle into the pulp and pulls it straight up, rocking it deftly to let the fibers settle just so as the water runs off. He does that several times, then flicks the mold face down on a table and taps it gently to release the sheet, which plops to the felt underneath. "I'll press it and dry it, and it will be a lovely sheet of paper," shrugs Kimball.
David Kimball recently travelled to Thailand looking for inexpensive kozo with which to flood the American papermaking community. "We hope that a lot of people who are making paper will get excited about it," he says simply. Kozo has been more expensive than rags -- a 22" x 30" sheet of Japanese paper costs from $4-6 per sheet now, largely due to the expense of the fiber, and raw kozo from Japan costs about $14 per pound, "but this bark from Thailand will only be three or four dollars a pound, and you can get a lot of sheets from a pound of kozo."
Don Farnsworth's fiber of choice is abaca, "the veins of a type of banana plant from the Phillipines -- they're the longest, strongest, most sensual and beautiful fibers around." His own art reflects that. He forms the luminous sheets using a Japanese su which is itself the work of artisans costing $700.
"The style the Japanese used 800 years ago is the style we use here," says Farnsworth with a pride that reflects both the Japanese aesthetic that informs his art and his recent residence in a Japanese papermaking village with his Japanese-American wife, Era Hamaji. "Papermaking was a family trade, even a village trade, for centuries, but now the younger Japanese are letting it go. They don't care to stick their hands in the cold water when they could go work for Toyota, or get a good job in the city." He says that sadly but does not seem too sad. Apparently, one concludes, we are simply in the midst of yet another geographical shift in the travels of the ancient and honorable papermaking trade -- this time to California, USA.
