Category: Paper

I’m back from Vermont and one of my first tasks is to tackle rearranging my studio. Or at least dealing with some of the boxes I haven’t unpacked since we moved. When packing my studio to move to Santa Fe, I got so overloaded with deciding what to keep and what to get rid of, I finally just put everything in boxes and brought it with me. There’s been so much to do to get our house set up, I’ve not unpacked several of those boxes. And the other day when I finally did, I got a pleasant surprise — a little roll of 2 sheets of handmade paper from Cavepaper, one mustard colored and the other grey blue. When I unwrapped them, I gave up on unpacking and rearranging and instead spent the rest of the afternoon going through my paper stash, getting reacquainted.
Then yesterday a wonderful word showed up on word spy: “paperphilia”

n. A deep appreciation for the aesthetic qualities of paper; a preference for reading items printed on paper rather than displayed on a screen.

Here’s one citation they give (all of them here):

Why Moleskines, and why now? Their resurgence coincided exactly with the rise of digital connectedness, and my gut told me the two must be related. But how? Was it just nostalgia, an effort to escape from the messiness of the present into the simplicity of an idealized past? Maybe paperphilia really isn’t so different from the recessive pinings that motivate some people to own antique cars.
—William Powers, Hamlet’s Blackberry, Harper, June 29, 2010

Several of my books use structures I learned from Vermont book artist and printmaker Claire Van Vliet (from classes with her as well as her book Woven and Interlocking Book Structures). So when I heard there was a small exhibit of her work close to my sister’s house in Vermont, where I’m staying for the month of August, I made it a point to go take a look. Much to my surprise and delight, on exhibit were lithographs of stones, most of them outside Abiquiu, New Mexico, near my own home. The one above is called “Ghost Mesa” and is close to Ghost Ranch, where Georgia O’Keefe lived and painted, and about an hour from my house in Santa Fe. (The exhibit was called “Stone on Stone,” as they are stone lithographs of stone outcroppings.)
I found an interesting interview with Van Vliet by Bob Bahr — Van Vliet’s Rocks — where she talks about why she often uses stones and rocks in her work.

Claire Van Vliet, a veteran printmaker and an acclaimed art-book printer and publisher, loves to draw rocks. “Drawing rocks gives you a really good excuse to make a picture that is just pure form, without a literal history,” she says. “When I start, the form catches my imagination — the shape of the rock is what catches my eye. I’m not looking for anything specific. That’s why I like to work with something abstract like a rock. I’m just looking, seeing.”

You can see more of Van Vliet’s lithographs here.

I spent a happy hour the other day paging through the collection of scanned vintage labels, alphabets, coloring books, posters, matchbooks and other ephemera on Agency Eureka. The picture to the left is just one example.

Hasegawa Yosuke folds currency into little portraits with hats. Looks like he tries to match the hat to the currency’s country. And he calls it “moneygami.” For those with an iphone, there’s an app that has folding instructions and a video. (I’m jealous because I can’t check it out, as we don’t get AT&T reception where I live, so I had to give up my iphone.)