Thursday, May 15, 2014

Ruth Vaughan ~ Springwater Paperworks Studio ~ Hemlock, NY

 Ruth Vaughan ~ Springwater Paperworks Studio ~ NY

Paper pulp as a medium for imagery
“From a painter’s point of view, one of the interesting things about working with paper pulp is that it offers the artist a pallet of textures as well as colors. I blend several varieties of cellulose pulp with pigments or dyes, as well as adding “adjuncts” like bits of silk threads, finely ground birch bark or flower petals to give me a wide variety to select from while creating an image. Pulp can also be sculpted and carved as it has a dimensional aspect. Artwork can be made any size and any shape, as the artist is creating both the support and the image. The immediate drawback for the painter is that pulp solutions cannot be used as paint in the traditional sense; they must be poured or squeezed from a dropper one little splotch at a time. This is a time consuming process, and pulps can only be applied to a backing of freshly made paper which hasn’t been allowed to dry out if the natural bonding process between the fibers is to occur. The affinity I find in the fibers for evoking many aspects of landscape imagery keeps me exploring the subject in my artwork.”

 

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