Nori

Blue Peony Flowers - sumi ink and gansai paint on Xuan paper

Nori in Japanese can mean dried seaweed, it also refers to a rice-based paste used as glue. Nori paste can be purchased in a tube or tub from Amazon or most art supply stores. Although I use a packaged powder to make my wet mounting paste for my paintings, nori can also be diluted to make the paste. When I paste the mounted painting to the drying board, I use nori to secure the edges. The nori paste is far more reliable and, most of all, it is easy to spread around the edges with my finger rather than using a hake brush to spread the mounting paste.

Recently, I used a batch of mounting paste that was too runny. No surprise that I ended up with a painting that was only partially mounted. The result was one very wrinkly piece of work. Destroying a painting during the wet mounting process is not anything new to me. It is part of the learning process which goes on forever. Using mounting paste with the wrong consistency is a terrible mistake, and I know it was a result of switching to dry mounting for a while. I lost what I had learned from wet mounting practice by not continuing to practice. However, there was as bright side to all this.

I remembered my grandmother replacing paper on shoji screens (wooden framed sliding doors). She made the glue she used to paste the kozo paper to the wooden frame by simmering rice for hours. Basically, she made her own nori paste. Once paper is glued with nori, it is so sturdy that it feels almost permanent. Before pasting the new paper, of course she had to remove the old one. She did this not by using some toxic remover but by soaking the pasted portion of the paper with water. Once the paper absorbed the moisture, it peeled off beautifully. I must emphasize that this was all done very gracefully and patiently. The soaking done gently as well as the peeling. No sharp objects, no heavy equipment, no toxic substance, just water and graceful hands.

Using this technique, I gently (with emphasis) sprayed my wrinkled painting and let the moisture soak in. Once the paper was moist, I gently (very, very gently) lifted the very delicate (and very thin, mind you) Xuan paper away from the mounting paper. Xuan paper, once wet, can be as delicate as a wet tissue paper. Yet if you respect it, it will cooperate with you and will show its resilient nature alongside its delicate nature. So, with grace and wisdom passed on from my grandmother, I was able to successfully release the painting from the mounting paper. Once the painting was dry, I was able to redo the wet mounting, this time with paste that had the right consistency.

It all sounds trivial, but for me it was anything short of a miracle. For a kid growing up in Japan who scoffed at traditions, I can proudly say that as an old woman I am finally wise enough to understand the wisdom that is passed on from generation to generation. For those that are young, I strongly recommend that you at least observe your elders whether you like what you see or not. One day, you may be surprised what you understand looking back.