the conservation studio sent me home with a stack of 1790s ledger paper and I've been staring at it for three days
Not staring at it in the good way. The way where I take it out, lay it on the table, put it back in the folder.
It's a probate ledger, hand ruled, dated 1794. Watermarked. The paper is gorgeous and completely unusable, because it came to us as a bound item and someone on staff decided it was too far gone to repair, so it's been deaccessioned and I was allowed to take the blank leaves.
Here's the problem. Every blank leaf has a bit of someone's actual life bleeding into the gutter. A column of numbers. A name, half a name. Something pressed in 1796 that's now a brown stain shaped like a leaf.
My whole practice is torn edges and silence. I cut the pieces. That's the point. But I sat there with the scalpel on Tuesday and just could not put the blade through a man's handwriting from 1794 to make a nice grey rectangle for a gallery wall.
So now it's Thursday and there's a stack of 18th century paper on my table doing nothing, and I'm starting to suspect the paper is winning.
Not looking for advice. Just wanted to say it out loud somewhere that isn't my own head.
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Oh this would wreck me too. I paint on cheap canvas board and I still get weirdly reverent about a fresh blank one, so actual 1794 paper with somebody's handwriting bleeding through? I'd never touch it either.
But honestly I think the bit of life in the gutter is the whole point. You're not supposed to make it disappear, you'd just be working around it. A column of numbers and half a name is already a composition. Half the time I ruin a painting by trying to cover everything and fill the whole surface, and the ones I actually like are the ones where I left something alone and built next to it.
No pressure, but if you ever do put something down, I want to see it. What would you even use on it, something light like gouache? I'd be scared of anything wet 🙂
Working around it is right, but it's not just composition. Rag paper that old is already brittle at the gutter where it was bound, that's where it took all the flex. Whatever you put on those leaves needs to be dry and light near that edge or you'll be the one that finishes what 1794 started. Pastel or a dry medium. Nothing wet.
The gutter brittleness is the part I keep circling back to. I work in conservation, so I know exactly what a flexed spine does to rag over two centuries, and yet I still laid the leaves out flat like they were ordinary stock. You're right that it's not only a composition problem.
Dry and light at the edge. I'd been thinking wheat starch paste for a backing, which is water and now I know better. So it's pastel or nothing, and pastel fights the restraint I want anyway. Half of this stack may just stay as it is. Unworked.
The cheap canvas board thing is not as far off as it sounds. Reverence isn't about the price of the thing, it's about not wanting to be the one who ruins it. I have a stack of ordinary brown kraft that I've had for two years and can't bring myself to cut.
You're right that the numbers are already a composition. What stops me is that it's not mine. Somebody ruled those columns by hand, in 1794, and now I'd be the second person deciding what goes on that page. I don't know if that's respect or just cowardice. Probably both. But I've stopped putting it back in the folder every night, so something is shifting.