The alchemical, archaeological, and ethereal resonance of Earth have been the unwavering protagonist throughout Virginia Jaramillo’s (Mexican American, born 1939) artistic career. In 1979 she responded to an advertisement for a papermaking class sponsored by The New School at Dieu Donné Papermill’s flagship location in SoHo. She was motivated by her desire to step away from painting and expand her practice following the Stained Paintings of the late 1970s—large earthtone canvases with vibrating horizons engulfed by aqueous color fields. Inspired and challenged at Dieu Donné, she shifted to hand papermaking and for the next thirty years amassed a body of work that deepened her aesthetic investigations.

Jaramillo initially came to Dieu Donné intrigued by the texture, light, and density of watermarks and began adapting the technique “as a means of drawing and structuring multiple layers of colored pulp in her evocative paintings,” notes Dieu Donné founder Sue Gosin.1 Watermarks are traditionally small insignias in paper that identify the maker or acknowledge whose paper the message carries, perhaps similar to an artist’s recognizable style and mark making. She quickly expanded watermarking by innovating its scale and purpose to support her aesthetic. “Throughout many years of collaborating with Jaramillo,” longtime artistic director Paul Wong acknowledged that “a number of DD [DieuDonné] process terms were invented such as ‘double dipping,’‘skinny dipping,’ ‘skimming the vat,’ throwing veils of pulp,’ ‘random couching,’ ‘pulp painting with the mould,’ and ‘metal drying’ (to simulate metal surface).”2 These techniques were affectionately referred to as the “VJ Theory,” named after her first Visual Theorems series from 1979.

Driven early on in her painting practice by the Japanese concept of ma, which emphasizes the importance of space between objects, the Visual Theorems works embody perceptions of worlds between worlds. Ma is depicted by the fusion of the Japanese character for “moon” (月) under the sign for “gate” (門), resulting in the ideogram, 間, which describes moonlight streaming through a doorway, the simultaneous components of objective space and its essence. Jaramillo utilized the abstract structure of the laid mould coupled with her own watermarks to create abstract lines and forms that she felt embodied the concept of ma. Small in scale, many of the Visual Theorems, like Visual Theorems 24 (1979), contain monumental architectural frameworks such as the post-and-lintel structure, which echoes the Japanese character for ma and references prehistoric Stonehenge. She created these using masking tapes of varying widths in horizontal and vertical lines and contact papers cut into geometric forms to watermark the sheets of paper. Watermarking and using raw pigments that settle into the lines of those impressions, produced the ghostly compositions of the Visual Theorems distinctive to her work. They resemble traces of archaeological foundations, worn ancient scripts, fragile and ephemeral maps or tablets existing somewhere between the past, present, and future.

Over the next five years Jaramillo increased the size of her handmade paperworks to approximately 60 x 30 inches, creating vast dimensional spaces and using techniques akin to painting such as throwing multiple veils of separately dyed colors of pulp from on eend of the vat to the other, making surfaces appear like architectural palimpsests or couching multiple sheets like layered slabs of shale thickening the medium. She would often add iridescence to the pigments, which emphasized the ephemeral, celestial-like depth of the surfaces, reminiscent of the moonlight aura leaking through the gaps in the proverbial gate illustrating the concept of ma. The pulp was fused together with a hydraulic press and made even more sheen by a sheet of metal pressed on top of it, her “metal-drying” technique. The unique and progressive hand-papermaking methods Jaramillo developed at Dieu Donné demonstrate the astute mastery she has over her abstract language—discreet and uncanny—which “quietly establish” what writer and artist Grégoire Müller described as “their own standards,” further noting that people are drawn to the paperworks’ “contained, interior strength of an uncompromising aesthetic.”3 He was reacting to the ability of Jaramillo’s handmade paperworks to gently bring people “beyond the surface.”4

In several series of handmade paperworks through-out the 1980s and ’90s, such as Transactions at Altamira (1987), Sidereal Inscriptions (1988), Anonymous Site (1990), and Teotihuacan Studies (1997), Jaramillo references both real and unreal places as well as conditions of time and history. In Transactions at Altamira, the title references the Paleolithic cave complex in Spain illustrated by drawings of bison, deer, and other game animals. An inset diamondshape in the center of the composition—a motif connoting something rare and precious—is formed by well-worn watermark lines of slightly varying lengths extending vertically and horizontally beyond the vertices. She threw veils of pulp in her preferred earthtone palette—teal, ochre, shades of terra cotta, and purples—achieving color with a range of depth and dimension one might see in the original rock caves of Altamira. Transactions at Altamira reference a specific location, and while Jaramillo’s Anonymous Site series’ title points to unknown, nameless, or unidentified places, the works resonate most directly to her identity as a painter, regardless of media. They are the only handmade paper series mounted on canvas and set inside a thin gold frame. This, together with her signature watermark echoes Müller’s statement on the self-assuredness ofJaramillo’s work.

Jaramillo’s engagement with a range of hand-papermaking processes allowed her to inscribe theoretical connections across history, place, and the metaphysical world. The Sidereal Inscriptions refer to “sidereal time,” the duration it takes stars to complete one revolution around Earth and contain sweeping lines and dynamic angles that allude to the visualization of this astrological timescape. In the Teotihuacan series, linear compositions signify the ghostly outlines of the temples and pyramids of the pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican site where archaeology ascribes the period referenced in these works. These architectural-like drawings of shadowed square forms set within varying opaque layers of couched black-and-purple ground are in dialogue with the inky forms that course through the cracked surfaces of the Black Paintings of the early 1960s. Throughout Jaramillo’s dedication to hand papermaking, she utilized, developed, and expanded techniques that embodied her decisive and assured abstract, visual language. As Wong noted, she had a “clear sense of what she wanted to achieve,” which was to extensively explore the potential of the watermark. She did this and more, originating a distinctive alchemy that transformed pulp into Earth and paper into the cosmos.5

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notes

‍1. Sue Gosin, “Founder’s Message,” Pulp: Dieu Donné Quarterly Newsletter No. 33, April–June 2001, 2.

2. Sue Gosin, “Founder’s Message,” 2.
3. Gregoire Muller, “Through the Surface,” unpublished manuscript, August 1982.
4. Gregoire Muller, “Through the Surface.”
5. Panel Discussion: Dieu Donné on Virginia Jaramillo with Sue Gosin and Paul Wong, moderated by Erin Dziedzic at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, 2023, 27:00. See the full panel discussion at Kemper Museum’s Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuPlqax3Ffw. For an excerpted transcript of the panel discussion, go to Hand Papermaking’s website at https://www.handpapermaking.org/post/dieu-donne-on-virginia-jaramillo-excerpts-from-a-panel-discussion-moderated-by-erin-dziedzic.

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