The Paper Makers

Carol Jessen

Carol Jessen uses the technique of bokashi to gently merge light and dark, gently allowing the viewer's attention to move from dark to light, object to object. With her color woodcut The Paper Makers Carol Jessen has the viewer peering into the interior of a Japanese paper-making workshop. In the foreground is a stack of newly formed sheets of paper and behind those are two papermakers working a 'dance' with a large screened frame in a vat of water 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. In the background are large ceramic pots with the various pulps and pastes they are using. Anyone planning a trip to Japan should visit a papermaking village.

Printmaker, painter, and pastelist Carol Jessen was born and raised in Oakland, California, and has remained a Bay Area resident for the entirety of her career. Following graduation in 1972 from San Francisco State University with a BA in journalism and biology, she traveled throughout Europe, India, and the Middle East. Upon returning to California in 1976 she took art classes at the Mendocino Art Center, Mendocino, and enrolled in the Academy of Art University, San Francisco.

Her time in the Far East continued to inspire her and, after being introduced to the art of woodcut printmaking, she traveled to Kyoto, Japan in 1979 to take a 9-month course in the medium from Richard Steiner at the famed studio of Master Printmaker Toshi Yoshida. She returned once again in 1982 to enroll at the Miasa Cultural Center, taking a one-month intensive course emphasizing Japanese printmaking from Yoshida. She would continue to create color woodcuts through the early 1990s, and lectured on the medium at the Palace of the Legion of Honor (SF, 1989), Stanford University (Palo Alto, 1990/'92), and the Asian Art Museum (SF, 1990).

Beginning in the mid-1990s Jessen turned her attention to oil pastel and painting, her mediums of choice to this day. She continues to work and exhibit throughout the Bay Area and beyond. Her work is held in the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio and the New York Public Library, as well as several private collections.