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TagsBY PAT SUMMERS
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
"The very rich are different from you and me," says a character in an F. Scott Fitzgerald story. Similarly, "The homes of artists are different from yours and mine," a non-artist could say, and often be correct.
Take artist-papermaker Judy Tobie's home, in a secluded area of Lawrenceville, Mercer county. Somewhat free form and set in a comfortably unmanicured property, it's got the usual, necessary elements — chairs and a couch, bookcases, a kitchen and so on — but these things seem incidental. No doubt serviceable, they're really just background.
The house Tobie and her husband Roger live in is chockablock with surprising and fascinating "stuff" at every turn, on every surface. A walking tour could take hours, but for an artist-watcher, the time would be well-spent. It's as if she has filled her domestic world with the sorts of things that stimulate art creation, and she merely gazes around to get ideas.
Even if that's not her plan, it's clearly working anyway.Tobie's collections include beach artifacts and other natural-world phenomena — lotus pods, sun-bleached turtle shell pieces, gourds, pine needles, leaves, feathers, skeletons, birds' nests and a wasp nest. ("Wasps are great papermakers," she mentions.) Complementing all this are the artworks — hers and others' — that take up any leftover space. (BTW, that walking tour just became an art museum tour.)
By the 1970s, paper had become more than a universal utilitarian substance as hand papermaking began to be seen as an art in itself. And why not? Pulp can be made from a variety of appealing materials, and it can be manipulated in myriad ways — beating, casting, folding, incising, piercing, shrinking, spraying, stretching, wrapping and wrinkling are just a few.
Its expressive possibilities caused pulp to became the medium of choice for growing numbers of artists. "I'm interested in making paper and making art from paper," as Tobie says of her signature medium. Because she works in other mediums too — taking a workshop here, a class there — her own oeuvre, some of it on view at home, includes ceramics and prints, as well as two- and three-dimensional handmade paper creations.
Tobie's 2-D abstract compositions can be framed and hung, while her 3-D work includes sculptures, decorative objects, jewelry and note cards. Her one of a kind cards and cast-paper earrings and pins are available for purchase in the gift shops at Hamilton's Grounds for Sculpture and the Michener Museum in Doylestown.
Many papermaking steps occur in Tobie's basement, where she uses an array of "official" and improvised tools. In one corner sits a big aluminum "beater," a kind of drum she had shipped from New Zealand. With it, basically, "fabric goes in and pulp comes out."
She also employs a heavy old Waring blender to prepare pulp, which between sessions might go into the nearby refrigerator. An ironing board serves as a surface for fabrics she may use, while a paint-mixer mechanism works like an immersion blender. If she doesn't air-dry them, the artist dries newly made paper sheets on felt, in a book press or on a clothes-drying rack.
In her window-filled studio upstairs — still another fascinating, "stuff"-filled part of her habitat — Tobie keeps a book of paper samples she made from a variety of raw materials: daylily leaves, lemon grass, garlic, corn husk , kale with clay, bamboo leaves and shoots, cat tails, hostas.
She demonstrates how to lower a mold and deckle into a vat of pulp, then raise them, trapping the pulp. Once dried, this sheet of handmade paper might be natural or multi-colored, plain or with embedded material; coarse or smooth. Deckled edges are even possible.
From her native England, Tobie moved with her family to Washington D.C. She always wanted to make art, she says; in 1980, she earned a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in NYC. She took her first papermaking class about 25 years ago and began making paper at home 10 years later.
"I'm a water sign," she says. "I like all things water." For Tobie, that includes regular lap swimming and of course the water-based papermaking process itself. The running water and sink in her basement permit her to work there, and the garden hose out back facilitates the summer papermaking workshops she offers.
Later this year, Tobie will travel to Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, for a "papermaking gathering" that involves artists who met through an online papermakers group. "We feed off each other," she has said in describing how new ideas are percolated from the sessions she takes and teaches.
For information about Judy Tobie's summer papermaking workshops, contact her at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
Freelance writer Pat Summers also blogs at AnimalBeat.blogspot.com.
