Viewing page 47 of 132

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

THE MOST OBVIOUS type of handmade-paper prints are prints that are executed on handmade paper. But even the simplest-sounding order - say, for flat sheets of a certain size of texture intended for etching, lithography or silkscreen-can present a unique challenge to the papermaker. Twinrocker, for example, was asked in 1973 by Landfall Press' Jack Lemon to make three-by-four-foot custom sheets, although according to Kathryn Clark, "nobody had done sheets that large before." She and her colleagues not only did it-the paper was subsequently in Jim Dine's print The Red Bandana (1973-74)-but in doing so invented a technique, now used by others as well, for "dipping a large mold using only two people." 
It is hard to imagine certain major prints without their special handmade paper. The thick sheets ordered from Twinrocker by Styria Studio in New York for Robert Rauschenberg's 1981 "Arcanum" series provided a living, breathing surface on which the artist not only laid down silkscreen, silk-collage and watercolor imagery but introduced areas of exposed paper as elements of the overall composition. The multicolored TGL (Tyler Graphics, Ltd.) handmade sheets for Frank Stella's 1982 "Circuits" etching-and-woodcut series heightened the coloristic impact of this intensely pictorial group of prints. Both artists had already made their marks in the field of handmade-paper prints with well-publicized projects in the mid-1970s. The success of Rauschenberg's "Bones & Union" series and Stella's group of six paper reliefs, of which Grodno (I) (1975) is an example, helped to alert the art world to the alternatives offered by handmade paper to the standard ready-made rectangular sheet. 
Garner Tullis, a leading papermaker who opened Experimental Printmaking in Santa Cruz in 1973, the forerunner to his Institute of Experimental Printmaking in San Francisco, believes the rising interest in handmade-paper prints during the 1970s "came out of an increased awareness of the craft movement among artists." 
For Alan Shields, who has freely integrated craft-related objects (such as beads) and activities (such as sewing) into his art, handmade paper is a medium that he used enthusiastically for his work since the early 1970s. He recalls executing his first batches of handmade paper in collaboration with papermaker Joseph Wilfer at Wilfer's Upper U.S. Paper Mill in the town of Oregon, Wisconsin, and printing them at the Jones Road Print Shop and Stable run by printer and artist William Weege in Barnevald, Wisconsin. Among the works from this period, Tirtle Boil, Rub Out, and Fruit Dish (all 1974) show how Shields realized his aim "to generate a piece of paper unique in itself." He 

[[image in top right]] Alan Shields' Treasure Map Dark, 1980-81, 35 1/2 by 27 1/2 inches, incorporates woodblock and stitching on paper made in India.

achieved this by investigating and reinventing for himself the major elements of paper and printmaking, including shape and textures as well as the operation of dyes, pigments, and watercolors. At the same time, he recalls his attitude toward the printing was "loose," and he developed his own style for working in a variety of techniques, including serigraph, etching lithography, embossing and flocking. He would also finish off surfaces with handworked details such as stitching. 
Shield's sensitivity to the potential of paper as an active and expressive element in his graphic work was already striking in the early examples mentioned above. The surfaces emit rich tonal variations achieved by the artist's subtle alternation of sheet thicknesses, or the number of layers being printed on. Thus, enhanced, the imagery offers glimpses of a geometric cosmos where interlacing abstract forms and patters-circles over squares, for example, and running sawtooth designs-exist in dynamic flux. The watermark-the design in the paper that is visible when the sheet is held up to the light-has remained a source of fascination for Shields. He has used several techniques to make them, including attaching copper-wire constructions to the screen of molds, applying tape and paint, and, as he says, "developing a method to make the watermark holes."

October 1983/81