Power of pulp
By: Barbara Kiser
Tags: Printmaking, Artist, Midcentury Modern

Recently I realized that much of what I love is basically paper. Manufactured, printed, painted. Paperbacks and hardbacks, prints and posters, cards, postcards, letters, notebooks, photos, programmes, tickets. In the pre-digital cosmos where my life began — the era of mountainous correspondences and filing-cabinet Manhattans — pulp ruled.

Christmases were paperfests. I grew up in mid-century America, a time and place now associated with finned Chevies and ads featuring waspish-looking women brandishing kitchen equipment. That soon-to-be kitsch aesthetic was around, but Duluth harboured a dedicated community of artists, architects and craftspeople more attuned to Scandinavian design, Bauhaus and the ‘coolth’ of Charles and Ray Eames.

My father, whose specialisms included printmaking, was a part of it for years. A prime element of Christmas was thus the ritual of the cards: the pondering, the designing, the printing, the epic posting — scores of artists all over the country launching a blizzard of artworks through the mail, little flying galleries.

One of my father’s Christmas cards (a wood engraving).

A paper-and-reproduction card by Will Barnet — painter, watercolourist and printmaker. My father hosted him as visiting faculty at the University of Minnesota, Duluth.

A printed card by the painter and sculptor George Tsutakawa, whom my father met while teaching in Seattle.

My dad also crafted snowflake papercuts, and strangely gripping little storybooks for me with illustrations and enigmatic phrases lopped from magazines and newspapers.

One of my father’s snowflake papercuts.

Then there were his gift wrappings — fantasias in tissue paper, ephemeral as moths: magnificent frou-frous, sinuous abstractions in glue and glitter, Matisse-y cut-outs, boldly inked faces, birds, patterns.

My mother (who worked in other media — textiles, ink, flour) would take a break from rosette frying and springerle stamping to dig out our copy of Pauline Johnson’s Creating with Paper, and we’d cut, fold, score, glue and slot, my brother meanwhile magicking rhinos and frogs from the origami pack. Johnson was a gifted art educator, as eloquent on the Jacob’s-ladder fold and the uses of tinted cellophane as she was on the satisfactions of geometric solids.

From Pauline Johnson’s Creating with Paper, University of Washington Press.

When I look back at our industrious hilarity, the flash and glimmer of Christmas with an icebound lake and six-foot drifts just outside, I see my parents summoning joy. They had suffered in different ways from the Depression, Dust Bowl, war years, then been caught up in the surging hope of America’s postwar intellectual and artistic ferment — when the art of Lee Krasner, Rothko, Kline was unleashed as the influence of Moholy-Nagy, Arshile Gorky and early pioneers such as Kandinsky and Miró coalesced. Sometimes it hits me that America’s mid-century generation of artists is all but blown away: Will Barnet, one of the last, died at 101 in 2012.

Art and literature and poetry seemed both bulwark and revolt against midcentury brutalities, from McCarthyism to persistent racism. They remain so against today’s. A good thing, then, that the energy, invention and devotion to craft are all still here, despite an increasingly bizarre art market and the hard reality (some would say impossibility) of making a living as a creative writer or artist.

The cloud might now seem the ultimate repository of our intellectual property, despite its ephemeral edge — the endless jig of 0 and 1. Instagram is an astounding, perpetually shifting gallery of art. Yet materiality persists, and not just as plastic.

In my archive are the paper trails of my parents’ journeys. Pieced together, they are long and sometimes arduous accounts of voyages through time — the long tumult of the 20th century. That I can put my hand on something these two people made or wrote docks me for a moment in their endlessly curious, questing sensibilities.