In papermaking, pulp painting is a technique in which image and substrate become one. I have experimented with pulp painting to achieve effects I could not otherwise realize. My methods include the basics: squeezing pigment-saturated pulp through plastic bottles and applying mists of water through a nozzled hose. I have found that leaning in and blowing the pigmented pulp lends a particular control over how color disperses and transforms across the water-slick surface. Templates can block certain areas to impose a structure; stencils can be used to pour colored pulp into specific open areas. Thin paper can be laid on top and pressed as chine collé. Once the application of colored pulp is completed, the sheet gets pressed and dried, and it becomes a unique object. Surface and image conjoined.
I first experimented with pulp painting in 1997 at Dieu Donné in New York after completing a suite of air-thin ochre sheets for a book, Scratching the Surface: A Visit to Lascaux. Pat Almonrode, then Studio Director, urged me to give pulp painting a try. Instead of putting paint on paper, I was embedding color, merging fiber with fiber. I was mesmerized. The color would skid and glide across this wet surface of a newly formed sheet, and I would follow where it went, intuitively adding more pigment, or allowing the white ground its own room to breathe. I kept these first attempts, not certain how to use them, but knew at some point they would find their purpose. Since that time I have been immersed in pulp painting, mostly at Dieu Donné.
Much of my studio practice includes travel—sketching and writing for magazines on assignment with my husband, photographer Macduff Everton. This work afield is often the impetus for making artist books, bringing text and images together. However, during the pandemic, hunkered in place, I relied on another sort of travel—explorations within the studio. I began rummaging through the flat files and discovered sheets of pulp-painted paper I had made including those first experiments in 1997. Fresh work would come from this cache of saved materials.
One of my favorite poems by Robinson Jeffers, “Return,” offered an especial solace during the pandemic: “A little too abstract, a little too wise, it is time for us to kiss the earth again....”1 It was time to reconsider and refocus from the faraway to the tangible nearby. In the spirit of return, I formed a large grid collage, The Return: Four Corners (2021). Pulp paintings from an earlier papermaking session became material for a memory-mapping of the canyon lands I traversed in the American Southwest. By revisiting and reimagining its geography—a mingling of earth and artifact—pulp painting was a process of coaxing the layered strata further into the present.
For years I have sourced images from ancient sculpture to incorporate in my paintings, but in 2021 I started the Cutouts Series, edging towards sculpture itself, creating physical forms from the sheets of pulp-painted paper. Based on a crouching Aphrodite figure in the collection of the British Museum, Speak to your Shadow (2020) is a pair of two-sided collages cut from pigmented cotton and abaca paper. I envision this pair as mobiles, interacting with one another and with their shadows cast on an adjacent wall. Guided by Andrea Peterson, I formed sheets using a deckle box, and after the water drained from the large box, I painted with dark umber pulp in calligraphic marks, free and bold. I also experimented with a black-pigmented paper base overlain with a thin layer of white micaceous pulp, and then spritzed to create rain droplet effects. Aphrodite has returned in my recent Cutouts Series inspired by large Greco-Roman floor mosaics. I repurpose paper in the drawers and combine the shapes with hand painting to create large collage works.
Creating new work with pulp paintings from the drawers is a wonderfully generative process, but nothing replaces the vitality of pulp painting, on the wet floor, in the moment. In 1999, I paired my paintings with Pablo Neruda’s poetry for a book that summoned the sea. I stood before a vat of pure white linen pulp and started to add concentrated pigment—phthalo, ultramarine, cobalt—stirring and gauging how the hue paired with images I conjured of sea foam, froth, of the blue shores of silence. The poetry guided me. Drying the test patches with a hair dryer it was clear I needed to ‘dirty’ the color a bit and put in a pinch of burnt umber and two dashes of black. When the vat spoke to me of the colors of Neruda’s sea, I needed some structure for these 30 x 22-inch sheets, so I cut templates from scraps of foam core I found lying around, to resemble branches off a single spine. I laid the makeshift template on each newly formed sheet and visualized images of sea foam. I found that blowing gently over the surface displaced the pulp so that the darker edges took on a dimensional quality. I made fifty crisp linen chemises, each of which held twelve triptych folios with poetry printed letterpress on thin, handmade, white linen paper—a poem in Spanish on the right and the English translation on the left, flanking a central print. The title of this book, On the Blue Shore of Silence: Poems of the Sea by Pablo Neruda came from one of Neruda’s poems, “No Me Hagan Caso/Forget About Me.”2
Although the wet process of pulp painting naturally calls forth the sea, it can, as easily, evoke time-worn landscapes when pulp is married to earth pigments. For the book A Sacred Geography: Sonnets of the Himalaya and Tibet (2008), I created pulp-painted sheets in desert hues to carry the sonnets of my daughter, poet and anthropologist Sienna Craig. To prepare the mind and palette, Sienna led me and Macduff ahorseback through the second deepest gorge on earth, the Kali-Gandaki, to the walled kingdom of Lo Monthang, Nepal. She shared with us her deep connection to this ancient land, the landscape of strata, earthen hues of sienna and pale ochre. Her own name, derived from the sienna hues of desert varnish in the American Southwest, offered me a personal connection. I noted the colors of the serpentine mani (prayer) walls, leading into a village, and the chöten shrines streaked with white, red ochre, and gray, colors representing three Tibetan deities. In the papermaking studio I painted these colors in stripes of pigmented pulp on both sides of 8 x 20-inch sheets. Then, unplanned, I intuitively shot a fine spray to disperse the stripes I had painted on just the right-hand side. It seemed a way of expressing impermanence. Perhaps I was thinking of the Tibetan monks’ painstaking Mandala sand paintings, that, when completed, are simply swept away.
Pulp painting excites me. Each time feels like the first time. Each stroke or application of colored pulp invites my imagination to take wing. I love the feeling of gliding and skating across the wet surface of newly formed sheets, maybe adding language, maybe creating more cutout objects from the pigmented sheets, always welcoming the delight of a unique imprint, a layer, a gesture, signifying a moment in time.
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NOTES
1.
Robinson Jeffers, “Return,” in Selected Poetry (New York: Random House, 1937), 576.
2.
Excerpt from “Forget about Me”: “ ...Let us look for secret things / somewhere in the world, / on the blue shore of silence / or where the storm has passed, / rampaging like a train. From Folio 8 in On the Blue Shores of Silence: Poems of the Sea by Pablo Neruda. Translation by Alastair Reid, paintings by Mary Heebner (2000, Simplemente Maria Press, edition of 50).
