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I have been a professional artist for more than 50 years. I started my career in advertising as a freelance illustrator. In the mid 1980s I moved away from commercial art and began to create oil paintings, and to experiment with paper mache. My exploration of paper mache began when I moved from LA to California Heights in Long Beach. My new digs were in a classic So Cal neighborhood of Spanish styles homes and duplexes. There were wide alleyways on every block. People routinely discarded old tables and chairs in these alleys and I snatched them up. Armed with books on vinegar finish, faux marble painting, and other furniture finishing techniques, I turned the discards into useful and decorative furniture for my studio. In one of the books, I came upon a photograph of an elaborate 18th century paper mache table. It was almost impossible to believe this wasn’t wood. Intrigued, I scoured the library for books on the old methods of making paper mache and I started experimenting. About that time, we had a series of powerful earthquakes in Los Angeles and Long Beach. Worn down by life in general, and the frightening earthquakes in particular, I got into my not-very-road-worthy VW bug and fled. I had no destination in mind, other than to get out of the area. At the end of the day, I found myself up in the foothills near Hemet, in front of a historical monument called The Maze Rock. I stared in wonder at an enormous boulder carved with an intricate petroglyph maze. It spoke to me. I drove home with renewed purpose and began to make boulders out of paper mache. Then used what I had learned from the furniture finishing techniques to complete them with faux stone finishes. Over the years, I have refined those techniques and learned/added some of my own. I use simple materials in making the paper mache pulp (shredded paper, Elmer’s Glue, plus Plaster of Paris) and recycled materials in the creation of the armatures for the sculpture. Lately, I have been making larger, hollow vessels that don’t require an internal armature. This allows me to pack these vessels with cut up plastic (saving the plastic from going to a landfill) before I apply the finish. This is not a solution to the plastic recycling problem, but it is my small contribution towards it. My goal with these sculptures is twofold: to expand the perception of paper mache beyond the notion that it is kindergarten artwork, and to invite my viewers to consider how they might reduce/reuse the plastics in their daily lives.
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