Artist Statement

A sense of wonder and play energize my work: the play of light on the mountains, trees, meadows, fields; the magnificent cloud formations, reflections on the water, the colors and textures of nature. How do I capture the changing light in my paper?

I am a gatherer. I gather images, and I gather plants. Paper begins with plants.

I cook them, beat some into pulp leave some unbeaten. Some pulp I pigment, some pulp I leave its natural color. I create my art with the remarkable medium of paper pulp.

Paper can be a flat surface for drawing or painting or printing, or it can hold an image inside it as a pulp painting. It can be shaped, or allowed to take its own shape. It can hold words or imagined worlds. Paper has a living quality, shaped by the plants from which it was made.

I have been making paper for over 20 years. I tried my first pulp painting in 2002, at a class with Lynn Sures at the Corcoran School of Design in Washington, DC. Two years later, I took my first drawing class with artist, Anoma Wijewardene, in Sri Lanka. In 2006, I began to find my artistic voice using paper pulp as the medium for my painted images. In 2008, after 20 years in the Foreign Service, we moved to Middlebury, Vermont. I set up the Washington Street Paper Making Studio in 2013.

My most recent work explores 3-D paper art as well as printmaking on my handmade paper, and I continue to explore the world of pigment and paper and fiber, creating luminous pulp paintings of Vermont, and the many countries where I have lived over the past 30 years.

Please contact me to visit my studio in Middlebury, Vermont.

Deborah Sharpe-Lunstead’s work can be seen at Art on Main Gallery, Bristol,VT and at her Washington Street Paper Making Studio in Middlebury, VT.