Paper so beautiful you can't cut it

That's precisely the dilemma Andrew Ferren found himself in this past summer after he bought some hand-painted paper at Madrid's De Papel.

In his words, from a July 5, 2009 New York Times story, "... with scissors in hand, I couldn’t make the cut. The paper, an orderly arrangement of concentric turquoise and cobalt circles limned in gold and white, suddenly seemed like a brilliant modern redux of the bold blue-and-white Iznik pottery prized by the Ottoman sultans for centuries. It was too perfect to consider sacrificing even a strip of its loopy forms and is currently at the framer being put under glass."

Montse Buxó i Marsá, the Catalan artist who made the paper (her work is pictured above and below), numbers among her principal clients "... an international coterie of artisanal bookbinders who make their living dissecting her work. 'I’ll sell several sheets to a binder who plans to cut them up for a specific project he’s working on, but when I come back a year later, there they are hanging on the wall in his office.'"

Wrote Ferren, "Recently some bookbinding clients have quietly asked her to lower the quality of her work or to start selling the sheets she considered inferior, she said, because her inventory has become too beautiful and too expensive for their cutting and pasting purposes."

"'There is no one else making papers like hers,' said María Cerezo of De Papel."

Want to see something spectacular?

Here's a link to a 79-page monograph about the artist featuring some 70 examples of her work.

Simply breathtaking.

It took me forever to choose the exemplars featured above.