Paper Post
Hello from Holly
I wanted to talk about paper for a little bit… hope that’s ok?
This past six months I’ve been increasingly drawn to paper.
Not as a support surface in the background sense, but as something active, something I carry around, fold into my day, tuck into bags, tape to walls, take down again, and bring back home. It moves with me in a way larger works can’t. It’s accessible, tangible, cheap, and it doesn’t ask for permanence in the same way canvas or stretched work does.
There’s a kind of relief in that. A lightness. Nothing feels too final.
Lately I’ve found a glossy paper that I really love, slick enough that ink glides across it almost without resistance. It changes the way I approach the mark. My acrylic paints, which are usually a bit unruly in their own way, seem to enjoy it too. They sit differently on the surface, more alive somehow, less dragged and more placed.
What’s been most interesting is how the A5 scale changes my gestures.
Small brushes. Small sheets. Big impulses, contained.
There’s something exciting about that compression, taking quite gestural marks and forcing them into a limited space. The gesture doesn’t disappear; it tightens, folds in on itself, and becomes more deliberate without losing its energy. Always almost too much for the surface. Always nearly spilling over.
I often tape around the paper before I start, to account for this spillage.. The painting runs over it anyway. It doesn’t feel wrong; there’s a kind of freedom in not being held by a border, like the edge is doing its job in advance, quietly taking care of itself.
But something happens to my eye when I paint across the tape. The boundary disappears. I can’t quite tell where things begin or end anymore. The image starts to drift. Not lost exactly, just unmoored for a moment.
And then the reveal: I peel the tape away.
Suddenly it’s all held again. The edges return, crisp and certain, like they were there all along waiting to be seen. What felt loose or uncertain resolves into something contained, not corrected, just clarified.
It calms me.
It makes me feel, briefly, like I know what I’m doing.
Even if, in the middle of it, I don’t.
Anyway, I really like drawing on A5 paper, I’ve got a stacks of paper paintings lying around the studio. And a whole bunch uploaded onto my website if you did fancy a closer look.
Holly,
somewhere on the north coast.
