Fischer was born in Berkeley, California, in 1908. Before her first birthday, she moved with her family to Massachusetts. She graduated in 1928 from Mount Holyoke College, where she majored in psychology. She went on to study design at the Kunstgewerbe Schule, Vienna, Austria, and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1940 she concentrated on weaving at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and then studied further at the Wetterhoff Institute of Handcrafts in Finland and in Norway. Her experiences in Finland and Norway strongly influenced her sense of design. One of the early wave of twentieth century fiber artists, she saw the artistic potential of weaving, which had been viewed until then primarily as a functional craft. Fischer did not consider herself a weaver or a painter (or, later, a papermaker); she was first and foremost a designer. She stated, “There is a process of sifting and mulling until only what seems to be universal remains; then it, too, is simplified, sometimes to the degree of becoming an abstract symbol.”1 Color was her primary interest. “Colors and patterns seen in city and country intrigue me: layers of light in ocean water at night; spaces and rhythms and lines associated with the sycamores, birches and pines; people and festivity,” she wrote.2 Fischer exhibited her tapestries widely throughout the United States while teaching classes in design, color theory, and art history at the College of Design, Architecture and Art at the University of Cincinnati from 1955 to 1972. By then renowned for her weaving, she began experimenting with papermaking in 1957. Fischer believed that the desire to make paper had always been there: “I must have been born with it. I remember as a small child asking my father how paper was made. I was quite shocked to learn that it was made from dirty old rags. … As an artist working on paper, drawing and painting, it all made me very paper conscious. I started collecting paper years ago, just to have it, and look at it and feel it.”3 She read extensively the works of Dard Hunter and John Mason (whom she considered more helpful than any other author on the subject), and articles about Douglass Morse Howell. Her first success in hand papermaking came in the summer of 1958, when she used a small lab paper mould given to her by an uncle. In 1969, in search of more training in papermaking, she took a sabbatical from teaching and studied for three months in Japan. Abe Eishiro, a papermaker designated a National Living Treasure by the Japanese government, was one of her teachers. Under his instruction, she learned a pouring process that is a highly esteemed art form in Japan, with its great tradition of processes and designs. While Abe was obliged to use the method only for pouring stripes, in furtherance of ancient tradition, Fischer was able to experiment and adapt the technique for her own uses. She also studied at the Saitama Prefectural Laboratory, Ogawa, and the Shiroishi Washi Studio Group, Miyagi. On her return from Japan, she practiced for two more weeks at a rented papermaking facility in Milwaukee, then worked to begin applying this experience to create her unique combinations of pulp and woven elements. For Fischer, the papermaking process was a logical extension of weaving in that she used linen thrums (warp ends and scraps from the beginning and endings of weavings) as her raw material. This was a conscious choice, born of thrift and economy, that challenged and inspired her. She sorted jewel-colored linen fibers by hue and left them to soak for months in buckets of rainwater. (Fischer insisted that rainwater was superior to chemically treated tap water for the long wet process necessary to make her paper. Whenever it rained she would collect the water in an old beer tub; she also saw this as an affordable alternative to buying distilled water.) She kept her fibers covered with water and monitored them like a gardener with a green thumb: “I go by feel—when it’s good and gooey and slimy, then it’s just right.”4 She soaked some fibers for as long as seven years. The fibrous soup went into a small beater, built especially for her in 1973 by Elmer Garrett, of Bridgewater, Connecticut. This half-pound beater had a unique roll, made with replaceable hacksaw blades. During beating she would sometimes mix the linen fibers with recycled kozo paper, for additional strength and structure. She also used other methods to prepare her fibers, including putting them through a meat grinder and boiling them. Fischer made her images on heavy, old English and American papermaking moulds. She would set the mould in a child’s wading pool and begin pouring the slurry from pitchers in overlapping designs while embedding woven fragments and threads into the surface. Overlapping the wet pulp was necessary because she used no glues or sizing in her paper. She composed her paper paintings spontaneously and she was moved by impulses while developing the work. She would use cardboard stencils to pour the pulp through and eyedroppers to apply pulp to smaller areas. The organic nature of the fibers produced a densely matted texture, rich in color and flecked with particles. Many of the woven elements she originally embedded were scraps from weavings that she had considered failures. She later made small open-weave tapestries expressly to incorporate in her paper pieces, with specific colors and textures. She would weave these on small, notched cardboard looms of various shapes. In many designs she would interleave the threads through the layers of pulp to create an overall effect. She often listened to music and worked to the rhythm. After the pouring was completed she would lift the mould and move it back and forth, to further entangle the threads and fibers. Fischer would then couch her image onto a stack of felts. When she lifted the screen her design would be revealed; she described this moment as “a thrill, like seeing wet pebbles.”5 Her press was an unusual assortment of drawing boards and bricks; anything heavy. She seemed to like the long way around and her techniques changed depending upon what she was working. She felt she learned from each experiment she did with her process. Although often besieged by people wanting to watch her work, she almost always declined. “It’s got to be between me and God and the materials.”6 Art critic Ellen Brown has written about Fischer’s work as art, beyond the unique, labor-intensive process: “The distinct contrasting fibers shooting through the work are like powerful brushstrokes on the foreground of a color field work. The subdued areas of color blend with one another, and the textural variation provided by the threads add a sense of surface interest and movement. The works create a tension between the serenity of the softly colored background and the energy of the threads. One is soft and flowing, while the other is hard and brittle.”7 Ruth K. Meyer, noted art historian and curator, said about her former teacher: “I learned from the example of Mildred Fischer that if art is a way of life then that life becomes a work of art.”8 She wrote that Fischer’s work is important because of its “strong sense of the twentieth century art of abstraction—design and pattern and color relationships.”9 Fischer participated in many major exhibitions throughout her life, at venues that included the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Yale University; Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati; and the Cincinnati Art Museum. Her work is represented in many private and public collections around the world, including the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York, Grand Rapids Art Museum, University of Cincinnati, and the Cincinnati Art Museum (where a broad collection of slides of Fischer's artwork is available for viewing, in the library). Her enthusiasm about the possibilities of hand papermaking encouraged many beginners. She was always generous in sharing information and responded to anyone who contacted her. She also lectured on papermaking and her experiences in Japan. In a letter she sent to an interested student in 1983 she wrote, “The best advice I can give you is this: -after you have familiarized yourself with basic papermaking, through reading and attending a workshop and visiting the mills, go ahead and EXPERIMENT – even with primitive equipment—and try out your own ideas. You can always recycle the failures; Buckminster Fuller declares that 'the ONLY way to learn is through our failures' ---Lots of luck!”10 Mildred Fischer’s life inspired many. Her love and enthusiasm for art in its many forms—especially design, weaving, and papermaking—nurtured a new generation to continue in her footsteps. Notes:1. Fischer, Mildred. “The Weaver as Artist,” Shuttle Spindle & Dyepot, Summer 1979.2. Ibid.3. Foreman, Barbara Jo. “The Fischer Papers,” Cincinnati Enquirer, June 25,1978.4. Ibid.5. Ibid.6. Ibid.7. Brown, Ellen. “Superb Color and Composition,” Cincinnati Post, Nov. 20, 1976.8. Meyer, Ruth K. “Opinion: Life as a Work of Art,” Cincinnati Post, June 26, 1976.9. Foreman. 10. Letter from Mildred Fischer to Jeff Clark, 1983.