The Diamond Sutra of the Chinese Tang Dynasty, the oldest dated printed book in the world, found at Dunhuang, from 868 CE.

Papermaking is the process of making paper, a substance which is used universally today for writing and packaging.

In papermaking a dilute suspension of fibers in water is drained through a screen, so that a mat of randomly interwoven fibres is laid down. Water is removed from this mat of fibers by pressing and drying to make paper. Since the invention of the Fourdrinier machine in the 19th century, most paper has been made from wood pulp because of cost. But other fibre sources such as cotton and textiles are used for high-quality papers. One common measure of a paper's quality is its non-woodpulp content, e.g., 25% cotton, 50% rag, etc.

History[link]

Hemp wrapping paper, China, circa 100 BCE.

Papermaking is known to have been traced back to China about 105 CE, when Cai Lun, an official attached to the Imperial court during the Han Dynasty (202 BCE-220 CE), created a sheet of paper using mulberry and other bast fibres along with fishnets, old rags, and hemp waste.^[1] However a recent archaeological discovery has been reported from Gansu province of paper with legible Chinese writings on it dating from 8 BCE,^[2] while paper had been used in China for wrapping and padding since the 2nd century BCE.^[3] Paper used as a writing medium became widespread by the 3rd century,^[4] and by the 6th century toilet paper was starting to be used in China as well.^[5] During the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE) paper was folded and sewn into square bags to preserve the flavor of tea,^[3] while the later Song Dynasty (960-1279 CE) was the first government on Earth to issue paper-printed money.

In the 8th century, paper spread to the Islamic world, where the rudimentary and laborious process of papermaking was refined and machinery was designed for bulk manufacturing of paper. Production began in Baghdad under the supervision of the Grand Vizier Ja'far ibn Yahya, they invented a method to make a thicker sheet of paper. This helped transform papermaking from an art into a major industry.^[6] The earliest use of water-powered mills in paper production, specifically the use of pulp mills for preparing the pulp for papermaking, dates back to Samarkand in the 8th century.^[7] The earliest references to paper mills also come from the medieval Islamic world, where they were first noted in the 9th century by Arabic geographers in Damascus.^[8] Papermaking was diffused across the Islamic world, from where it was diffused further west into Europe.^[9]

Paper is recorded as being manufactured in Italy by 1220 and Germany by 1400, just about the time when the woodcut printmaking technique was transferred from fabric to paper in the old master print and popular prints.^[10] Modern papermaking began in the early 19th century in Europe with the development of the Fourdrinier machine, which produces a continuous roll of paper rather than individual sheets. These machines have become very large, up to 500 feet (~150 m) in length, producing a sheet 400 inches (~10 m) wide, and operating at speeds of over 60 mph (100 km/h).^[11] In 1844, both Canadian inventor Charles Fenerty and German inventor F.G. Keller had invented the machine and process for pulping wood for the use in papermaking.^[12] This would end the nearly 2000-year use of pulped rags and start a new era for the production of newsprint and eventually almost all paper was made out of pulped wood.

Manual papermaking[link]

Papermaking, regardless of the scale on which it is done, involves making a dilute suspension of fibres in water and allowing this suspension to drain through a screen so that a mat of randomly interwoven fibres is laid down. Water is removed from this mat of fibres by pressing and drying to make paper.

An illustration from 105 AD depicting the papermaking process as designed by Cai Lun.

First the fibres are suspended in water to form a slurry in a large vat. The mold is a wire screen in a wooden frame (somewhat similar to an old window screen), which is used to scoop some of the slurry out of the vat. The slurry in the screen mold is sloshed around the mold until it forms a uniform thin coating. The fibres are allowed to settle and the water to drain. When the fibres have stabilized in place but are still damp, they are turned out onto a felt sheet which was generally made of an animal product such as wool or rabbit fur, and the screen mold immediately reused. Layers of paper and felt build up in a pile (called a 'post') then a weight is placed on top to press out excess water and keep the paper fibres flat and tight. The sheets are then removed from the post and hung or laid out to dry. A step-by-step procedure for making paper with readily available materials can be found online.^[13]

When the paper pages are dry, they are frequently run between rollers (calendered) to produce a harder writing surface. Papers may be sized with gelatin or similar to bind the fibres into the sheet. Papers can be made with different surfaces depending on their intended purpose. Paper intended for printing or writing with ink is fairly hard, while paper to be used for water color, for instance, is heavily sized, and can be fairly soft.

The wooden frame is called a "deckle". The deckle leaves the edges of the paper slightly irregular and wavy, called "deckle edges", one of the indications that the paper was made by hand. Deckle-edged paper is occasionally mechanically imitated today to create the impression of old-fashioned luxury. The impressions in paper caused by the wires in the screen that run sideways are called "laid lines" and the impressions made, usually from top to bottom, by the wires holding the sideways wires together are called "chain lines". Watermarks are created by weaving a design into the wires in the mold. This is essentially true of Oriental molds made of other substances, such as bamboo. Hand-made paper generally folds and tears more evenly along the laid lines.

Hand-made paper is also prepared in laboratories to study papermaking and to check in paper mills the quality of the production process. The "handsheets" made according to TAPPI Standard T 205^[14] are circular sheets 15.9 cm (6.25 in) in diameter and are tested on paper characteristics as paper brightness, strength, degree of sizing.^[15]

Industrial papermaking[link]

A modern paper mill is divided into several sections, roughly corresponding to the processes involved in making hand-made paper. Pulp is refined and mixed in water with other additives to make a pulp slurry, the headbox of the papermachine (Fourdrinier machine) distributes the slurry onto a moving continuous screen, water drains from the slurry (by gravity or under vacuum), the wet paper sheet goes through presses and dries and is finally rolled into large rolls, often weighing several tons.

Another type of papermachine makes use of a cylinder mold that rotates while partially immersed in a vat of dilute pulp. The pulp is picked up by the wire and covers the mold as it rises out of the vat. A couch roller is pressed against the mold to smooth out the pulp, and picks the wet sheet off of the mold.

Key inventors include Henry Fourdrinier, Heinrich Voelter and Carl Daniel Ekman, among others.

History of paper sheet production[link]

Folio[link]

In the beginning of Western papermaking, paper size was fairly standard. A page of paper is referred to as a leaf. When a leaf was printed on without being folded, the size was referred to as folio (meaning leaf). It was roughly equal to the size of a small newspaper sheet. ("Folio" can also refer to other sizes - see paper sizes.)

Quarto[link]

A Folio folded once produces two leaves (or four pages), and the size of these leaves was referred to as quarto (4to) (about 230 x 280 mm).

Octavo[link]

If the original sheet was folded in half again, the result was eight pages, referred to as octavo (8vo), which is roughly the size of an average modern novel. An octavo folding produces four leaves; the first two and the second two will be joined at the top by the first fold. The top edge is usually are trimmed to make it possible to look freely at each side of the leaf. Sometimes books are found that have not been trimmed on the top, and these pages are referred to as unopened.

An octavo book produces a printing puzzle. The paper was first printed before folding and thus pages 8 and 1 are printed right-side-up on the bottom of the sheet, and pages 4 and 5 are printed upside-down on the top of the same side of the paper. On the opposite side, pages 2 and 7 are printed right-side-up on the bottom of the sheet, and pages 6 and 3 are printed upside-down on the top of the sheet. When the paper is folded twice and the folds trimmed, the pages fall into proper order.

Sixteen-mo[link]

Smaller books are produced by folding the leaves again to produce 16 pages, known as a sixteen-mo (16mo) (originally sextodecimo). Other folding arrangements produce yet smaller books such as the thirty-two-mo (32mo) (duo et tricensimo).

Octavo bookbinding[link]

When a standard-sized octavo book is produced by twice folding a large leaf, two leaves joined at the top will be contained in the resulting fold (which ends up in the gulley between the pages). This group of eight numberable pages is called a signature or a gathering. Traditionally, printed signatures were stacked on top of each other in a sewing frame and each signature was sewn through the inner fold to the signature on top of it. The sewing ran around leather bands or fabric tapes along the backs of the signatures to stabilize the pile of signatures. The leather bands originally used in the West to stabilize the backs of sewn books appear as a number of ridges under the leather on the spine of leather books. The ends of the leather strips or fabric bands were sewn or glued onto the cover boards and reinforced the hinging of the book in its covers.

Standardisation ISO sizes[link]

While opinions and speculation abound on exact reasons for standardized paper sizes, the most revealing feature of popular sizes (such as Letter and ISO 216 sizes) is that they conform not to some arbitrary device dimension, but that the length of the paper is chosen to be the width of the page times the square root of two (≈1.414). This feature allowed for a large page to be cut in half and the resulting two pages to have the same aspect ratio as the original piece (just with half the size). Repeated cuts can be made to reduce the entire sheet to one size of pages without wasted paper. This format was formalized by ISO 216 however such logic dictated efficient paper sizes long before the ISO was created. For example, traditional 8.5"x11" Letter paper is within a few millimeters of A4 paper (ISO 216) dimensions. While paper sizes "may" have been chosen based on the size of original frames, the frames themselves were chosen to make page reduction efficient without distorting the aspect ratio of the pages regardless of final size chosen. That said, there are paper sizes that do not conform to this idea when specific applications are needed.

Vatmen paper[link]

Vatmen Paper was a type of paper made in the Netherlands that was 17 inches (430 mm) wide and 44 inches (1,100 mm) long. 44 inches was (reputedly) chosen because that is how far the papermaker could stretch his arm.^{[citation needed]} A single vatman can generally handle a mold and deckle which produce up to a 25 inches (640 mm) wide sheet.^{[citation needed]}

See also[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Paper making

• Bleaching of wood pulp
• Sizing
• Stickies (papermaking)
• Tree-free paper
• Environmental issues with paper

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Herbert Holik "Handbook of paper and board", Wiley-VCH, 2006, ISBN 3-527-30997-7, ISBN 978-3-527-30997-9
• Cookson, Lynda "How To Make Handmade Paper" ebook ISBN 0-9550272-0-9
• Cropper, Mark (2004). The Leaves We Write On. London: Ellergreen Press
• Weber, Charles G. and Shaw, Merle B. "Experimental Manufacture of Paper for War Maps," Journal of the National Bureau of Standards 37 (325-330) 1946.
• Westerlund, Leslie C "Science and Practice of Handmade Paper" ISBN 1-876141-13-1: 2004; WES
• Westerlund Leslie C. "How to Make a Papermaking Hydropulper" ISBN 1-876141-44-1: 2007; WES
• Westerlund Leslie C. "How to Make a Papermaking Press" ISBN 1-876141-44-X: 2007; WES
• Westerlund Leslie C. "Dictionary of Papermaking" ISBN 1-876141-24-7: 2005; WES
• Westerlund Leslie. C."How to Make a Papermaking Mould and Deckle" ISBN 1-876141-46-8; 2007; WES
• Westerlund Leslie. C. "How to Make a Papermaking Couching L'Transfer Curve" ISBN 1-876141-49-2;2007;WES
• Westerlund Leslie. C. " How to Make Smooth Papermaking Technology" ISBN 1-876141-55-7;Westerlund Eco Services; Rockingham; W.Australia. 2008.
• Westerlund L.C., Ho G., Anda M., Wood D., Koshy K.C., (2008) Case Study of Technology Transfer to a Fiji Rural Village using an Improved ‘Sustainable Turnkey Approach’. Technologies and Strategic Management of Sustainable Biosystems; First International Conference. Murdoch University. W.Australia.6–9 July 2008.

Charles Thomas "Chuck" Close (born July 5, 1940) is an American painter and photographer who achieved fame as a photorealist, through his massive-scale portraits. Though a catastrophic spinal artery collapse in 1988 left him severely paralyzed, he has continued to paint and produce work that remains sought after by museums and collectors.

Life and work[link]

Close was born in Monroe, Washington.^[1] His father died when he was eleven years old. Most of his early works are very large portraits based on photographs (Photorealism or Hyperrealism technique) of family and friends, often other artists. In an interview with Phong Bui in The Brooklyn Rail, Close describes an early encounter with a Jackson Pollock painting at the Seattle Art Museum: "I went to the Seattle Art Museum with my mother for the first time when I was 11. I saw this Jackson Pollock drip painting with aluminum paint, tar, gravel and all that stuff. I was absolutely outraged, disturbed. It was so far removed from what I thought art was. However, within 2 or 3 days, I was dripping paint all over my old paintings. In a way I’ve been chasing that experience ever since."^[2]

In 1962, he received his B.A. from the University of Washington in Seattle. He then attended graduate school at Yale University, where he received his MFA in 1964. After Yale, he lived in Europe for a while on a Fulbright grant. When he returned to the US, he worked as an art teacher at the University of Massachusetts.

Close had been known for his skillful brushwork as a graduate student at Yale University. As he explained in a 2009 interview with the Cleveland Ohio Plain Dealer, he made a choice in 1967 to make art hard for himself and force a personal artistic breakthrough by abandoning the paintbrush. "I threw away my tools", Close said. "I chose to do things I had no facility with. The choice not to do something is in a funny way more positive than the choice to do something. If you impose a limit to not do something you've done before, it will push you to where you've never gone before."^[3]

Close's first one-man show was in 1970. His work was first exhibited at the New York Museum of Modern Art in early 1973. In 1979 his work was included in the Whitney Biennial. "One demonstration of the way photography became assimilated into the art world is the success of photorealist painting in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is also called super-realism or hyper-realism and painters like Richard Estes, Denis Peterson, Audrey Flack, and Chuck Close often worked from photographic stills to create paintings that appeared to be photographs. The everyday nature of the subject matter of the paintings likewise worked to secure the painting as a realist object."^[4]

One photo of Philip Glass was included in his black and white series in 1969, redone with water colors in 1977, again redone with stamp pad and fingerprints in 1978, and also done as gray handmade paper in 1982.

Close suffers from Prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness, in which he is unable to recognize faces. By painting portraits, he is better able to recognize and remember faces.^[5] On the subject, Close has said, "I was not conscious of making a decision to paint portraits because I have difficulty recognizing faces. That occurred to me twenty years after the fact when I looked at why I was still painting portraits, why that still had urgency for me. I began to realize that it has sustained me for so long because I have difficulty in recognizing faces."^[6]

Although his later paintings differ in method from his earlier canvases, the preliminary process remains the same. To create his grid work copies of photos, Close puts a grid on the photo and on the canvas and copies cell by cell. Typically, each square within the grid is filled with roughly executed regions of color (usually consisting of painted rings on a contrasting background) which give the cell a perceived 'average' hue which makes sense from a distance. His first tools for this included an airbrush, rags, razor blade, and an eraser mounted on a power drill. His first picture with this method was Big Self Portrait, a black and white enlargement of his face to a 107.5 in by 83.5 in (2.73 m by 2.12 m) canvas, made in over four months in 1968, and acquired by the Walker Art Center in 1969. He made seven more black and white portraits during this period. He has been quoted as saying that he used such diluted paint in the airbrush that all eight of the paintings were made with a single tube of mars black acrylic.

Later work has branched into non-rectangular grids, topographic map style regions of similar colors, CMYK color grid work, and using larger grids to make the cell by cell nature of his work obvious even in small reproductions. The Big Self Portrait is so finely done that even a full page reproduction in an art book is still indistinguishable from a regular photograph.

Close has also continued to explore difficult photographic processes such as daguerreotype in collaboration with Jerry Spagnoli and sophisticated modular/cell-based forms such as tapestry. Close's photogravure portrait of artist Robert Rauschenberg, “Robert” (1998), appeared in a 2009 exhibition at the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, New York, featuring prints from Universal Limited Art Editions.^[7] Close's wall-size tapestry portraits, in which each image is composed of thousands of combinations of woven colored thread, depict subjects including Kate Moss, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, Lucas Samaras, Philip Glass, and Close himself.^[8] They are produced in collaboration with Donald Farnsworth of Magnolia Editions in Oakland, CA.^[9]

In 2000, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.^[10]

Close currently lives and paints in Bridgehampton, New York. He has been represented by The Pace Gallery, in New York since 1977.^[11]

Close appeared on The Colbert Report on August 12, 2010, where he admitted he watches the show every night.

Christopher Finch wrote a biography, Chuck Close: Life, which was published in 2010, a sequel of sorts to Finch’s 2007 book, Chuck Close: Work, a career-spanning monograph.^[12]

"The Event"[link]

On December 7, 1988, Close felt a strange pain in his chest. That day he was at a ceremony honoring local artists in New York City and was waiting to be called to the podium to present an award. Close delivered his speech and then made his way across the street to Beth Israel Medical Center where he suffered a seizure which left him paralyzed from the neck down. The cause was diagnosed as a spinal artery collapse.^[13] Close called that day "The Event". For months, Close was in rehab strengthening his muscles with physical therapy; he soon had slight movement in his arms and could walk, yet only for a few steps. He has relied on a wheelchair since.

However, Close continued to paint with a brush strapped onto his wrist with tape, creating large portraits in low-resolution grid squares created by an assistant. Viewed from afar, these squares appear as a single, unified image which attempt photo-reality, albeit in pixelated form. Although the paralysis restricted his ability to paint as meticulously as before, Close had, in a sense, placed artificial restrictions upon his hyperrealist approach well before the injury. That is, he adopted materials and techniques that did not lend themselves well to achieving a photorealistic effect. Small bits of irregular paper or inked fingerprints were used as media to achieve astoundingly realistic and interesting results. Close proved able to create his desired effects even with the most difficult of materials to control. He spoke candidly about the impact disability had on his life and work in the book Chronicles of Courage: Very Special Artists written by Jean Kennedy Smith and George Plimpton and published by Random House.^[14]

See also[link]

• List of Chuck Close subjects
• The Portrait Now

References[link]

Sources[link]

• Bartman, William; Joanne Kesten (editors) (1997). The Portraits Speak: Chuck Close in Conversation with 27 of his subjects. A.R.T. Press, New York. ISBN 0-923183-18-3. 
• Greenberg, Jan; Sandra Jordan (1998). Chuck Close Up Close. DK Publishing. ISBN 0-7894-2658-7. 
• Wei, Lilly (essay) (2009). Chuck Close: Selected Paintings and Tapestries 2005-2009. PaceWildenstein. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/978-1-930743-99-8|978-1-930743-99-8]]. 

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Chuck Close

• The Pace Gallery
• Watch Chuck Close and Robert Storr in Conversation on BUniverse
• Watch/listen to full episode of KCRW's "Art Talk: Close-Up on Chuck Close"
• "Close Encounters," artNet Magazine, 8-05-08.
• "Close Call" By Jon Marmor
• Chuck Close at the Museum of Modern Art
• Chuck Close at the Walker Art Center
• Images of Chuck Close tapestries
• Chuck Close: Process & Collaboration
• Habits of Disbelief: Chuck Close by John Haber
• Book Review of "A Couple Ways of Doing Something"
• Images of Chuck Close Prints
• Antiques Roadshow segment with a Chuck Close abstract painting

Interviews[link]

• Smithsonian Archives of American Art: Interview, 1987
• Finding the Color World: Interview with Chuck Close, 2002
• Chuck Close and Bob Holman in Conversation, 2006
• One hour interview with Charlie Rose at Google Video (March 15, 2007)
• Chuck Close Q&A with Men's Vogue
• Chuck Close with Phong Bui The Brooklyn Rail, June 2008
• URBAN-MUSE.COM interview with Chuck Close at his NYC Studio (Young Artists and 9/11)
• "Close-Up," Chuck Close interviewed by biographer Christopher Finch in Guernica Magazine