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Re: about papermaking (off topic ...maybe)
Darryl, thanks for the excellent story about paper making in Ecuador --
especially welcome after the doom and gloom we normally dwell on (and mea
culpa for that!). But a propos of its mention of insuring supplies of
handmade paper for the future, I had a flashback to my own art school
days, circa, if you could believe practically before the invention of
electricity, 1949.
We had a course in hand lettering, Chancery Cursive to be precise, as in
old manuscripts (or bad facsimiles thereof, like my own), and our final
project, an illustrated book, was supposed to be on *handmade* or at least
all-rag paper. There was at that time only one dependable source, an
outfit called -- uh oh, -- Stevens Nelson? Which soon vanished; we
figured that was the end of good rag paper, and, although paper was in no
way as important an art supply as it is today (*drawing,* let alone art on
paper as an exhibition theme was undreamed of, at least at Cooper Union,
hotbed of abstract expressionism), we mourned the loss.
At the time, incidentally, I don't think any of the paper was made in the
US, it came mostly from France, England and Ital. In any event, the
company eventually resurfaced as Stevens Nelson Whitehead (or like that),
and since then, as we all know, handmade paper flourished, spread, gained
classic status -- and folks make their own out of straw or lintners to
print alt processes on, with 2 companies selling handmaking paper supplies
in Brooklyn alone !
Judy
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| Judy Seigel, Editor >
| World Journal of Post-Factory Photography > "HOW-TO and WHY"
| info@post-factory.org >
| <http://rmp.opusis.com/postfactory/postfactory.html>
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