Today I rode down to the canal to the st Armand paper company which is situated in a sprawling basement floor of a commercial building. The owners, who are also the paper makers, are going to move the business in December and scale it down. I walked down the steps into the cavernous basement, it had wide benches heaped with paper and raw materials, in the back I could see the giant presses and vats they use for the paper making process. The paper is made from any sort of fibers, such as old white shirts or recycled paper, which are skillfully crafted into new sheets. I went on a little shopping spree and got a variety of odd sized watercolour papers in bunches and paid at a little office desk tucked away into a corner. Most of their business is whole sale, they supply art stores like Avenue des Arts where I once bought some of their product. Today it was pretty cool to get this paper directly from the hands that made it, then go out and make few paintings in the area. This painting was done in Verdun just outside of Cilene and Fritz's place, it is a type of apple tree that produces very small, sweet crab apples that fall off in great numbers around this time of year. The paper had a rough finish, it held the paint well, and made perfect wet-in-wet effects. It was quite flexible which made it difficult to use on this windy day, next time I will fix it with an elastic, and line out an 8 x 10" area to keep it easily to frame. The st Armand paper was fantastic and I look forward to mastering its properties.
Crab apple tree Verdun, watercolour 8.5 x 11 3/4", rough press st Armand, September 2023 (No. 3654)
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