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The Korean War gave me the opportunity to spend the next four years as a radio operator aboard a Navy destroyer and to tour most of Europe and the Caribbean. Someone had to protect the Atlantic side. A formal art education started at Ohio University and finished four enjoyable years later after completing all the usual required courses including one media exploration class. There fate then stepped in. This class required us to experiment with one assignment in paper sculpture. Hold that thought. Then for fourteen years I worked as a keyliner, layout artist, designer, art director, illustrator, photographer and sales representative. While working for a major printing company. I was reunited with the unusual medium. The company vice president came into the design department as asked, " who can do paper sculpture?" "Ah ha!" I was bored with the annual report I was working on , so I volunteered to do the assignment, which was due the next morning. I made some quick sketches and spent the rest of the night fashioning a figure of a doctor complete with stethoscope, lab coat and tweeds. I was amazed by the instant approval from the management and the client the next morning. The figure was photographed, run through production and was on press that night as the first of six full-page illustrations for the U.S. Steel monthly news magazine. I realized this was the medium that suited my desire to do something out of the ordinary. In any design projects that followed I naturally steered the artwork toward paper sculpture as much as possible. Paper sculpture in the 1920's was used as a commercial medium in store window decorations. The advent of photography in print lead to the inclusion of paper sculpture as an illustrative medium for articles and advertisements. An art form that started out as simple cylinders, cones, and flourishes has come a long way. Like myself, most people working in paper sculpture are self-taught. Each new project presents and opportunity to experiment with new tools materials, and techniques to manipulate simple pieces of paper into pieces of artwork. After twenty years, I decided to include gallery pieces into my work so that they could be framed and enjoyed in three dimensions rather than only as a photograph. I'm drawn more to the pristine, classic "white-on-white" style of paper sculpture. Here light and shadow become even more critical in molding the subject without the aid of color. In photographing sculptures for reproduction the light can be adjusted and positioned endlessly, but in a gallery or home, daylight or room light dictates where shadows fall and define the subject. Recently, I joined a class in producing handmade and molded paper and have incorporated the facet of the paper art in to my work. Anything to elicit comments like, "How did he do that?" |
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My grade school teachers in Pittsburgh, PA often asked if I was
doing my assignment or drawing pictures. Naturally I had to admit I was drawing.
Art class was the one class I didn't want to end. I was recommended to attend
Saturday Tamoshanter art classes for sixth graders at Carnegie Museum.
Saturday classes at Carnegie Mellon University were followed by a year of
commercial art school at Ad Art Studio School.