The Paper Makers is a color woodcut created in 1992 by American artist Carol Jessen. It is pencil signed, titled, dated and editioned 22/75. The Paper Makers was printed by the artist on cream Japanese wove paper and the image measures 11-15/16 x 8-15/16 inches. This color woodcut is illustrated on page 70 in Michael Verne’s Quiet Elegance: Japan Through the Eyes of Nine American Artists.
Carol Jessen has the viewer peering into a Japanese paper making workshop. In the foreground is a stack of newly formed sheets of paper and behind those are two papermakers working with a large screened frame onto which they have scooped pulp. The papermakers gently shake the frame which evenly distributes the pulp and the screen allows the excess liquid to drip away. Anyone planning a trip to Japan should visit a papermaking village.
Carol Jessen, painter, printmaker, and pastelist,
was born in Oakland, California in 1951.After graduating from San Francisco
State University with a BA degree in journalism and biology in 1972, she
traveled throughout Europe, India, and the Middle East. Upon returning to
California in 1976, she continued her studies with art classes at the Mendocino
Art Center in Northern California, and at the Academy of Art in San Francisco.
Her time in the Far East continued to inspire Jessen and, after being introduced
to the art of woodcut printmaking, she traveled to Kyoto, Japan in 1979. Unable
to find a Japanese master to teach her the techniques of woodcut, she studied
with Richard Steiner who trained her only in black and white. In 1982, Jessen
traveled to the Japanese Alps for an immersive one-month course in the
techniques of multi-block color woodcut taught by Toshi Yoshida. She continued to
create color woodcuts through the early 1990s, and lectured on the medium at
the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, Stanford University in Palo
Alto, and the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco.
Beginning in the mid-1990s, Jessen turned her attention to oil pastel and
painting, her mediums of choice to this day. She maintains her studio at
Hunters Point Shipyard in San Francisco and continues to exhibit throughout the Bay Area and beyond. Jessen had solo
exhibitions at Stanford University in 1988 and at the Verne Collection,
Cleveland, in 1992. Michael Verne and Betsy Franco included her in their book Quiet Elegance: Japan Through the Eyes of Nine
American Artists. Jessen’s color woodcut Kamogawa was included in the 2003 exhibition, Japan & Beyond: The Yoshida Family Legacy in Japanese Woodblock
Prints
Jessen’s work is represented in the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; the Clark Center for Japanese Art, Hanford, California; and the Milwaukee Art Institute, Wisconsin.
