This juried collection features eighteen artists who have created distinctive handmade paper works utilizing paper pulp as a painting medium.

Within the broad field of handmade paper art, pulp painting is an emerging specialty attracting many artists with backgrounds in painting, drawing, printmaking, and other disciplines. To create a pulp painting, specially prepared pulps are applied to a freshly made sheet of handmade paper in a number of ways, sometimes with the aid of stencils, sometimes freehand, resulting in a finished sheet of paper that fully incorporates the image. The synthesis of substrate, medium, and image is a unique characteristic of the pulp painting medium, allowing artists to work not merely on paper, but in paper.

The jury for this portfolio selected entries that demonstrate the equal importance of visual image and well-made paper. Working with a wide variety of fibers and all manner of implements from common stencils and shaped deckles to obscure dental tools, the selected artists explore some familiar themes (abstracted nature, vessel forms, spiritual issues) and also investigate the strange and unfamiliar (Fibonacci numbers, microscopy, carnivorous plants).

A custom-made clamshell box houses the paintings, each in a protective folder imprinted with the artist’s name. A handbound booklet contains statements from each artist and a commissioned essay by the esteemed Jane Glaubinger, Curator of Prints at The Cleveland Museum of Art. Ms. Glaubinger has organized and written catalogs for numerous exhibitions on prints and works on paper, including the influential “Paper Now: Bent, Molded, and Manipulated” in 1986.

The artists featured in the portfolio are Laurence Barker, Shannon Brock, Wendy Cain, Kathryn Clark, Susan Gosin, Lois James, Bobbie Lippman, Bridget O’Malley, Dawn Peterson, Ken Polinskie, Margaret Prentice, Victoria Rabal, Beverly Sky, Peter Sowiski, Lynn Sures, Cynthia Thompson, Beck Whitehead, and Paul Wong.

Entries submitted for consideration were reviewed by two jurors with impressive credentials and expertise. Margaret Prentice co-founded Twinrocker Handmade Paper in 1971 and was Associate Professor in the Art Department at the University of Oregon, teaching printmaking and papermaking since 1986. Paul Wong was longtime Artistic Director (since 1982) of Dieu Donné Papermill where he has collaborated with many prominent artists. Both jurors are accomplished artists, exhibiting nationally and internationally, and have graciously accepted Hand Papermaking’s invitation to participate in the portfolio.

The portfolio designer is Steve Miller, and the editor is Mina Takahashi. All proceeds from sales of The Art of Pulp Painting portfolio benefit Hand Papermaking, Inc., a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing traditional and contemporary ideas in the art of hand papermaking.