Paul Anderson
I have always built stuff, made things with my hands. Didn’t always think of it as art, but I did think of it as a process which brought things into existence that didn’t exist before. I guess you could call that creative, although not necessarily artistic. However, I am fond of using my creative self and that part of my existence.
As a 12 year old missionary kid in West Africa, I scavenged shipping crates and made stools and rudimentary tables. Believe it or not they sold. I made a tree-house for myself. I built the cart that I pulled my little brother in behind my bicycle. I arranged beaks of birds, skulls of monkeys, feathers, sticks and even scorpions in bulletin board arrays in my room. I was delighted and laughed.
Perhaps because in Africa I couldn’t run down to the local hardware or toy store to buy new things I may have wanted or needed, I developed a scavenger’s eye. Things tossed aside, lost or forgotten, have always had for me a second or additional purpose. All I had to do was be creative and invent the next life for the “lost and found.”
So it went, my hands putting things together and in 1990 I began making rustic furniture out of aspen trees. Ironically the United States Forestry Service classifies aspen is a weed, generally used in the Southwest only for fencing. However, I couldn’t help but see the contorted, twists and turns that aspen puts itself through as it grows to create character which I wanted to bring into my wood products.
In 2012, my wife introduced me to clay, another medium to be formed and joined with wood, lost and found pieces of metal and other items, all adrift in overlooked places. As it is with driftwood, stuff found floating about on expansive seas of asphalt or salt water or junk piles creates unique qualities in these pieces that endears them to me.
When I make a piece that conjoins different mediums, all I’m trying to say is, “Look at this. Look what you may not have seen that could be called ‘beauty’.”
