Slightly Off Center

Denise and I have a long-standing tradition in celebrating romantic holidays: Do an art project! It's only very occasionally clay; much more often, we do something in the paper or book arts genre. So it was this time.

Last Sunday was our 34th anniversary, so we made marbled paper.

We'd tried marbling before with a quick-and-dirty kit that turned out not to work at all well--used a spirit based paint that only worked on very small surfaces, otherwise the solvent evaporated off too fast. It was also nasty and plasticky, really only suited for dipping bottles and knick-knacks. So this time, we got a proper kit, with paints, carageenan gum, alum for mordanting. I prepped eight sheets of drawing paper a few days in advance, dipping them in alum solution, hanging to dry, then putting them in the press to flatten. Saturday night, I mixed up a half gallon of the carageenan size in my stand mixer, left it overnight to settle. Sunday after lunch, I set up the work table, filled up the thrift-store cake pan, and we made a splash!

To make your paper, you drip successive colors onto the surface of the size, then manipulate them with a skewer, brush or some sort of rake--I made one from nails in a length of 1x2" wood. Then you float the mordanted paper on the top to pick up the colors, set it aside to dry. Like so:



We each did four sheets, suitable for book covers or end papers. Here are some more of the results.


They're all dry and back in the press again. And we celebrated with supper at Beppi & Giannis.

I found an old box of oil pastels while looking for my watercolor palette, so Denise tried them in place of crayons on her last sheet. Very bright, very resistant to the paint wash. And they seemed to take the wax coat all right as well.

Denise, being a paper-maker, is always on the lookout for buckets. Buckets to soak paper scrap, buckets to rett plant fiber, buckets to replace the buckets that have crumbled from prolonged exposure to sun and elements. It's like the old Bill Staines joke about wood stove people and dead trees--in her vision, empty buckets show up fluorescent orange.

So when we came done to load the kiln yesterday, she immediately spotted the two 5-gallon pails, with lids, next to the Club Mud dumpster. I went over to investigate, and discovered that they were labeled (and I don't mean Sliced Pickle Chips, though that too). No, they were labeled, in Sharpie, Paper Pulp.

Somebody had left behind two full five-gallon buckets of prepared and blended paper pulp. We of course immediately hauled them into my space in the studio.

I asked around the art center this morning, and they hadn't put them out there. Cece suggested that someone had brought them in to donate, found the office closed for the weekend, so just left them. Since they don't offer papermaking, we were welcome to them.

Good news! Because I'd borrowed a couple of mould-and-deckles and a dozen couching cloths from Denise, and spent the morning, once I'd mixed glazes and mopped the floors, out in the cool kiln yard pulling paper.



Because I only had white pulp, I decided to add whatever color and texture was locally available: mimosa leaves and blossoms, Japanese Maple leaves and keys, Oregon grapes, yellow hawkweed blooms, bits of moss. Brought some dried rose petals from home, harvested off the bush just before leaving. Ended up pulling about 20 sheets, and did an impromptu demo for kids from Maude Kerns' summer art program.

Reblogged from offcenter.biz

A couple of years back, Denise and I were in Wisconsin visiting my mother and wound up with a couple of days free. We drove down to La Crosse, where we'd first met, spent some time visiting friends and generally depressurizing from family. We had a free afternoon, so decided to drop by my alma mater, Viterbo University, to see how things had changed.

Oh boy, had they. New buildings, new names on old buildings, they even renamed a street. The Fine Arts Center was mostly familiar, albeit with a new grand entrance. The third-floor art department was wholly familiar.

Including the department head.

Sherri Lisota and I were freshmen together, back in the dim distant past. She'd finished her degree elsewhere, but came back to Viterbo to teach. We had a lovely time catching up, including showing her pictures of my pottery (some of which she'd seen previously in an alumni art show) and Denise's paper and books.

One thing led to another, and now, two years later, we're coming back as visiting artists!

Desk and Table, a gallery exhibit of pottery, handmade paper and hand bound books, will be on display in the Viterbo University Gallery from January 31 through March 27. The opening reception will be 4-6 pm on Friday, February 2, and Denise and I will each give a short workshop on Tuesday, February 6. (See the Find Us link at my website for details.)

The gallery is on the third floor of the Fine Arts Center, 929 Jackson Street, La Crosse, Wisconsin.

We traditionally try to schedule an art project for our anniversary (June 1. Happy us!), but this year, we had it a day late, as we had three different things scheduled for Friday, the 2nd: Pest control, pick-up of the leftover siding supplies, and, of course, the phone repair tech. Fortunately, Denise had a project that worked well with interruptions.

She took a class in faux-finish papers down at Newport this spring. It uses painter's paper, a light weight kraft used to cover windows, and layers of acrylic paint wash. You begin by crumpling up the paper artistically, then smooth it out and roll on a thing black wash, using a trim roller. After it's dry, you flip it over, and the black will have seeped through the creases. Successive washes of color build up rich tones that look almost like dyed leather.

It works well with interruptions, as even if you do it in batches, you still need some drying time. I wound up making only five sheets, what with the phone tech and other distractions, but I really like the effect, and look forward to playing with the results.

We escaped Market this weekend, went down to Newport for the 26th Annual Newport Paper & Book Arts Festival. Since I've given up Ceramic Showcase, April is a lot more relaxed, so I can take a weekend off without being critically behind on my pottery. Last year, Denise and I took classes together. This year, since her knee surgery, she's a bit more mobile, but still needed the car to get to her venues. Fortunately, my classes were both at the Performing Arts Center, an easy 10-minute walk from our motel. (Her Saturday workshop was fifteen miles away, in Toledo.)

She's been staying at the Rodeway Inn since her first NBPAF in 2006. It's clean, the rooms are generously sized, and it's not too spendy--I think we paid about $70 a night. They've replaced the beds since last year, and the memory-foam mattresses seem about six inches higher (which was a challenge for her) but other than that, no complaints.

I took a two-day workshop in Animated Pop-Ups with Shawn Sheehy, a paper engineer from Chicago, and had a wonderful time. He brought 15 project patterns along; we managed to get through twelve by the end of the second day, and I've got some ideas for adapting a couple of them for future card purposes. I'm also about 90% sure I could teach this pop-up turtle to our local book arts group at a meeting sometime this summer. I've left him my email, so he should be sending me a link to printable pdfs of his patterns to work from, with permission to adapt the structures and use in any non-paid capacity.

The third day, I reunited with Iris, our Indigo and Paste Papers teacher from 2022 for a class in Plant Ink Alchemy. Iris ran us through the chemistry of plant lakes, making red madder ink; insoluble pigments, with blue indigo; concentrating tannins, with a tan Sitka Spruce ink; and perhaps one of the oldest inks we have records of, an iron sulfate/oak gall concoction that makes an extremely permanent black, used for everything from medieval manuscripts to the Declaration of Independence.

Weather was surprisingly pleasant, sunny though cool and breezy. (Of course now that I'm home in Eugene, it's raining again.) Ate supper Wednesday night at Local Ocean, a fairly fancy new seafood restaurant in old town, where we enjoyed crab cakes and crab po' boys and watched sea lion, cormorant and kingfisher fishing the harbor. Thursday we went wandering through the Nye Beach area and discovered Sorella, a nice little Italian restaurant with very good pasta and not-too-bad prices. Friday, we went to an old reliable, Mazatlan, and by Saturday, we were so tired and stuffed that we drove home and had ramen with sliced Easter egg and fell into bed.

The first workshop Denise and I took, on Friday, was on creating decorative paste papers using natural colorants. We've made paste papers together before, using acrylic paints for color. This was a much deeper dive.

For one thing, Iris had us mix up our own colors. Each of us got a couple of cups of starch paste,* and a plant, animal or mineral pigment. Choices included cochineal (a bug), madder and indigo (plants) and a whole bunch of different earth pigments: red and yellow ochre, raw and burnt sienna, even an earth green from Verona, Italy. We mixed some liquid soap and glycerin into the paste, muddled the pigment with gum arabic, and then combined them to make a colored paste. As a potter, I felt obliged to pick an iron pigment; I chose yellow ochre.

For those who were concerned that natural colors might be pale or subdued, have a look at my palette. Clockwise from the top, that's Blue Ridge Yellow Ochre, Venetian Red, Luberon Red Ochre, Madder, Indigo and Cochineal.

We had great fun working on different substrates: Colored paper, navigation charts, Braille paper Denise had brought from home. I'd made some different combing tools from old credit cards and an expired driver's license, but some of my favorite pieces were just plain finger-painted.

We got a good bit of natural pigment theory, along with the hands-on experience of mixing the materials, but we also just had fun channeling our inner kindergartner. Especially me, who never actually attended kindergarten.

*Recipe:
1/4 part each wheat flour, rice starch, potato starch and cassava starch, dissolved in one part cold water to make a slurry. Slowly pour into 3-4 parts hot water, stirring constantly, and simmer over low heat until mixture thickens and turns translucent.

For two cups paste, add two teaspoons each Dr. Bronner's soap and glycerin, and mix two teaspoons pigment with the same amount of liquid gum arabic.

Our book arts group does an exchange every month, usually focusing on a theme or technique. In the before times, it was usually a book of some sort, though in the past two years we've gravitated toward postcards or Artist Trading Cards, as they're easier to mail. The March theme was wind, and the April was to use some of the design elements from the March presentation, so I combined the two in this nice little piece. White and colored gel pen on used Braille paper and AstroBright Black cover stock.

The quote is from a lovely L.J. Booth song, "Akasha Wind."

I've got two Zoom meetings today, afternoon and evening, and a lot of pots to trim in the studio that just aren't ready yet. So I can't really get anything done there; instead, I convince Denise to come outside and play!

It's iris season here, the two-tone purples are blooming like crazy, the black is budding, the peach just opened it's first flower yesterday. And half a dozen yellow iris, bright as the sun, are scattered around the yard.

Denise has made iris-dyed paper before. The black blossoms, in particular, make a lovely sky blue paper, and the various purples dry green. We've never tried yellow, though. So that's what we decide to do.

Process: Set up a sawhorse table in the sun. Fill a plastic sweater box with water and leave it to warm up. Get out screens, couching cloths (pronounced "cooch-"), various plastic containers, a blender, the press. While I do all this, Denise looks for a jar of mordanted (treated with alum to bind colorants to fibers) white paper pulp. Then I go pick off all the wilted yellow blooms, throw them in the blender with some water, and reduce to a slurry.

After that, it's mix some pulp with a little iris slurry, pour into the screen and swish about. Pull straight up, drain, lay a couching cloth (usually a sheet of Pellon interfacing) down on the paper, press out the water, and transfer the wet sheet to the post (stack of other couched sheets.)

Rinse, repeat.

I also harvested some of the purple blooms and blended them up, did some sheets with both colors of iris, some only yellow or purple. When we run out of pulp, irises or energy, I put the stack of paper sheets into a press to squeeze out the extra water, and Denise transfers them to blotting paper.

Leaf, as in sheet of paper.

When last we videoed our intrepid pulp-maker, she'd converted dried yucca leaf into a lovely golden paper pulp. And then had to wait for the next step until a week's smoke and several day's rain had cleared the air. At which point, we could finally make paper.




(Music by Kat Eggleston, Paper Boats, from her album Second Nature.)