Jacques Brejoux
For the last 50 years, Jacques Brejoux has been making paper in the Moulin du Verger de Puymoyen in the Charente region of South-West France. Entirely self-taught, Jacques is an accidental archaeologist, a dreamer, an innovator and a passionate historian who is regularly called on by institutions such as the Louvre, the Prado Museum and the Library of Congress in Washington, DC for his expertise in book restoration.
When an important restoration project called for a paper that no modern paper mill could create, he set his mind to recreating and constructing a medieval papermaking stamper that allows him to create some of the world’s most sturdy handmade papers from antique linen and hemp cloth. When he is not making paper, he can be found painting and sculpting from paper in his private apartment tucked in the belly of a 16th-century paper mill.
“In 2007, we organised our first workshop with Christopher Clarkson and Nadine Dumain for conservators and restorators from all over the world, including representatives of the Cambridge Library, Getty, Stanford and MIT. The second year we did it again and Valentine Dubar of the Louvre attended, and it snowballed from there. These workshops continue today.”
“Many of us start in the paper world for all the wrong reasons. We get into it for aesthetic reasons because we are bourgeois intellectuals and we often have no sense of reality. Yet reality obliges us to go in a certain direction and practice allows us to refine our papermaking.”
“One day I went from horizontal to vertical. It was as if I stood up straight for the first time. I’d never used an easel before in my life. It was at this moment of painting in a vertical format when I also recall removing all the ‘colour-blind’ colours off my palette, i.e. browns, ochres and earth tones.”
“Many artists paint or sculpt because they can’t do it any other way – but above all, because they don’t want to do anything else. I earn my living through papermaking, so I don’t feel the pressure to earn a living through my art or to assert myself as an individual.”
