Penland Residency

The air is part of the mountain, which does not come to an end with its rock and its soil. It has its own air; and it is to the quality of its air that is due the endless diversity of its colourings. Brown for the most part in themselves, as soon as they are clothed in air the hills become blue. Every shade of blue, from opalescent milky-white to indigo, is there.  

                                                          -- Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain

I started out the new year by spending a chilly week working in Penland’s indoor/outdoor paper studio. The surrounding Appalachian mountain views were my inspiration and I experimented with thin layers of overbeaten abaca and flax to create a single image. The sequence below shows each of four layers being added.

The photo below shows how this piece looked after 24 hours. When overbeaten flax dries there is a fairly dramatic change in color, which can be tricky to account for in mixing pigments -  you can see how my blue mountain ridges turned out dark green, and the last layer I added almost disappeared.

Unfortunately the time involved in beating pulp and waiting for paper to dry means that it can be challenging to respond and make alterations when things don't turn out as expected and you have a limited period of time. Despite these frustrations, as well as some rather unfriendly weather, I’m very pleased to have a nice stack of paper in various shades of "distant mountain ridge" to work with for upcoming projects this year.