Claire Van Vliet’s Pulp Paintings Bring Clouds Down to Earth

In 1966, Claire Van Vliet moved to the Northeast Kingdom to be close to the sky.

The book and paper artist, who turns 92 this summer, has won many accolades over a long career that shows no signs of slowing. She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, known as the “genius grant,” in 1989; her work has been exhibited at and acquired by institutions such as the National Gallery of Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts and, last fall, the Boston Athenaeum. So it’s surprising and wonderful that it’s also on view in “Sky and Earth” at the Satellite Gallery in Lyndonville through May.

Van Vliet founded Janus Press in 1955, when she was living in San Diego. The press became known for inventive, elaborately folded artists’ books and broadsides, many produced in collaboration with other artists. Janus Press was especially noteworthy because of Van Vliet’s innovations in papermaking and the way she connects paper, book and text.

“Sky and Earth” doesn’t include artists’ books or poetry broadsides. Instead, it treats the viewer to what Van Vliet calls “pulp paintings.” In 1976, she received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and began experimenting with pigmented paper pulp at Twinrocker Handmade Paper in Brookston, Ind., eventually developing the process she still uses.

After putting down an initial layer of beaten cotton pulp in a paper mold, Van Vliet adds pulp mixed with natural pigments — she describes it as “a bit like finger painting with applesauce” — before pressing the paper in a 20-ton press to create an ionic bond. Over the course of almost five decades, she has used the technique to make works of art that are, as Boston Athenaeum curator John Buchtel writes in his essay on her recent show, “embedded in the paper, not just on it.”

The results are intensely colored works with a heavy, velvety texture. Some are framed behind glass, while others are varnished with a clear acrylic finish, placing nothing between the surface and the viewer. What Van Vliet presents in the exhibition is, so to speak, exactly what it says on the tin: sky and earth, no frills attached.

The works reflect the nonagenarian’s warm but no-nonsense personality. She is one of those rare people who exude practicality and radically creative intellect in equal measure. Born in Canada, Van Vliet moved to San Diego when she was orphaned at 14 years old and separated from her siblings. She later lived in Europe, Philadelphia and Madison, Wis., making art and teaching, though she said she couldn’t stand the politics of academia.

She considered a move to Denmark — home of famously good skies — where she had trained as a printmaker. But then she and her glassblower husband, Michael Boylen, decided they wanted to live somewhere “actively depopulating,” where they’d have enough room for studios and equipment. When Boylen suggested Vermont, Van Vliet replied, “OK — if we can find good clouds.”

Newark, which according to Van Vliet had a population of 290 at the time, fit the bill perfectly: on a high plateau between rivers and mountain ranges, with flat fields and plenty of light. Van Vliet was undaunted by the isolation. She spent summers as a child with her mother’s family in Fort Frances, Ontario — the town just north of International Falls, Minn., known as the coldest place in the lower 48 states. “It was 10 miles by water to the nearest road and 15 miles by land,” Van Vliet said. Given that experience, the prospect of moving into a 150-year-old Vermont house with no plumbing wasn’t a big deal.

Van Vliet’s pulp paintings mostly depict the sky over the crest of a field with a gentle downward arc. Several of these are called “Earth Curve,” with the same geometry playing out in different colors and conditions of light. In one, it’s a paper-white snowy field under a sky that looks like veined gray marble; in another, a mud season view of foggy greenish browns under a rainy blue. In “Turffield at Sunset,” the same landscape is lit by an orange sky with deep gray thunderheads, the brown earth cracked through with orange veins. It looks like the surface of Mars.

Van Vliet’s works convey two opposing but equally present threads of the Vermont landscape: its unembellished plainness and its tendency toward melodrama. “Blood Moon” pictures only sky, where a glowing red orb rises behind charcoal shadows and frothy pink clouds. Yet there’s no less drama in “Earth Curve — Spring 8,” a triptych that gives most of the composition over to a furrowed field, leaving just a glimpse of storm clouds moving in across a salmon sunset.

The medium is partially responsible for this vivid effect. Van Vliet pointed out that while paint can get muddy as colors mix, different shades and values of pulp layer over each other, maintaining each color’s integrity and mixing only in the eye of the beholder. “It’s the way it is in the actual sky,” she said.

Van Vliet also uses her vista of a field, the same one she has looked at for 60 years, to place the viewer in the landscape. It isn’t distant or safe: “The ground is going below you, and the sky is going over you,” she said. “You’re in a middle distance.” It’s something she loves about Winslow Homer’s paintings, she said, where the viewer seems about to fall off a precipice into the ocean.

Van Vliet enjoys collaborating on book projects, which she said pushes her in unexpected directions. She has also made overtly political work — she scoffed at a Tesla that drove by during our conversation and, struggling with resurgent polio in one leg, said she has no patience for anti-vaxxers. But unlike her books and broadsides, which use words and images to express an idea, the paintings speak for themselves.

Back in Denmark, Van Vliet said, she made painstaking lithographs of fields and the sky. But integrating the images into the structure of the paper felt better to her, she said: “This is the medium that the clouds need.”

This article appears in Apr 16-22, 2025.

Got something to say?

Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!