The Sunday Paper #336

November 1, 2020

I hope you had a happy and safe Halloween!

Papermaker of the Week: Rix Jennings

This is a new column. If you’re a papermaker and would like to be featured in the coming weeks and months, please fill out this form. I’d love to hear from you!

© Rix Jennings, Neofossils, handmade paper reliefs.

Rix Jennings started making paper in New Hampshire during the 70’s, inspired by a paper bas-relief no-one could figure out a process for. He consulted his friend Elaine Koretsky who had not long before established Carriage House Paper. Jennings attended the first International PaperMakers conference in Boston. When he moved to Houston, he bought the equipment from the defunct paper making program at the Glassell School of Art, including a non-functioning Howard Clark “Stingray” and an ancient Valley beater, both gone now, replaced by a Davis Hodges and a Critter. With back and forth stimulation from Yama Ploskonka in Austin and Mark Lander in New Zealand, he has been developing papermaking with vacuum processes. Jennings is primarily an artist and recently retired after 25 years teaching at Houston’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. These days, he makes paper for drawing, and he hosts life drawing labs (pre Covid), workshops for drawing and papermaking, writes a monthly newsletter, and offers life drawing virtual kits and coaching.

In the Studio: 

I’m teaching a 3-hour virtual workshop through the Maine Media Workshop on December 6th, which you can register for now. The Shadow Lantern is one of my favorite projects to teach, and the structure is incredibly versatile. It can be displayed as a book, a lantern or a folding screen, and the paper cutting possibilities are endless. Come explore light with me as we wind our way towards the darkest days of the year.

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Papery Tidbits:

• Registration for the Paper Year Online 2021 begins tomorrow, and I’ll share more about it next week. Some of you have followed this journey for more than 5 years! It began right here on my blog. Here’s a sneak peak of the projects.
• Have you listened to my podcast interview with Meg Black?

An origami dragon folded by Ezra Kauffman, a seventh-grader at Lancaster Mennonite School. Photo by Ezra Kauffman.

Annie Lopez, The Liberation of Glycerine, 2016; Cyanotype on tamale wrapper paper, thread, zipper, and metal buckle, 51 x 48 x 52 in.; Collection of Eric Jungermann; Photo by Katie Jones-Weinert, Tucson Museum of Art

Michele Gee takes a photograph of the installation of 10,000 angels at Ripon Cathedral (Danny Lawson/PA)

As seen on My Modern Met.

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Friends, what can we do? I was heartbroken to learn that a 21-year old young man who was in my son’s class in Portland, OR from 3rd – 7th grade was shot and killed by Police near Portland on Thursday night. I ache for a solution to this violence, and have no words, but will continue to say his name. My husband posted this on Facebook: “Earlier this week, I interviewed two Washington State legislators and a retired Washington State Patrol officer about the difficult subject of police reform, and this morning I read this linked story in Newsweek, about a 21-year-old young man who lost his life last night to police gunfire in Vancouver, Wash. The headline asks “Who Is Kevin Peterson Jr?” While I don’t know what led to the violence that was unleashed in that dark parking lot in Vancouver last night, I do know that a decade ago, Kevin Peterson Jr was a classmate of my son’s at a public Waldorf school in Portland, an 11-year-old boy who almost always had a smile on his face and sometimes played in our home. I took this photo of Kevin at a 2010 Portland Village School field trip to the Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center in Oregon, which also is gone, destroyed by the wildfires that raged across the state in September. https://www.newsweek.com/who-kevin-peterson-jr-blm…”

When Kevin and our son were in 5th grade, I facilitated a papermaker’s garden project at their school. We planted and grew papermaking plants and processed them into paper. Among other things, we visited a community garden, and Ted helped the kids write poems on the paper they made. The project culminated in an exhibition at the neighborhood library. Here is Kevin collecting plants at the garden, along with the poem he wrote. Rest in peace and power, dear one. We must do better than this!

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Featured this week in my Studio shop: Collage Packs, Alpha, Beta, …, A Map to Now, & Papermaking with Garden Plants & Common Weeds.

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