Before I could read or write, I had already stumbled onto the flexibility of something called “paper.”  While my designer parents were creating their original furniture styles, we lived in the back of a store fronting Main Street in Vancouver, Canada and I was left to my own amusement much of  the day and quietly enter tained myself, at the age of four, by sticking various strips of paper into the openings of the grate in our stove.

The results elicited by the flames created in me a passion for dancing colors that has compelled me to reproduce them on floors, walls, canvases, fences, or whatever will support my efforts.

My second home was on the beaches in Vancouver harbor as well as those on Vancouver Island where I spent a good deal of my summers. Here I could run on the sand, gather up armloads of seaweed and create aquatic gowns that rivaled those in Hollywood. What joy it was to collect sand dollars and with a three-penny nail and a rock, pound a center hole, string them up and hang them around my neck for ‘sea jewelry.’ And such fun to peal the starfish off the rocks, hold them high and watch them change color as the water flowed out of them.  I always returned them before any real injury came to them. Shells, rocks, driftwood, and seaweed were the beginnings of my second passion — texture!

When I began using torn bits of paper for paint I chose the expensive magazines with high gloss colors and had no lack in finding them when they were tossed out by others. In fact, I had to turn away carloads from friends anxious to share their castoffs with me.  I would sit for a spell and tear out the colored pages and adver tisements and put each color in separate piles to be inserted in zip-topped plastic bags. These became my pots of ‘paint.’

At first I simply pasted them in a manner of decoupage on a paper support and enjoyed the ‘stained glass’ effect of the finished piece.  What I really wanted was to be able to ‘paint’ on canvas without having to protect the art with glass.  Experimenting with different acrylic mediums,  I found that the clear acrylic medium  was a very suitable binder.  I would paint a stroke of acrylic medium on a gessoed canvas, pick up my color bit of paper with my brush and paint it in place with a coating of the clear acrylic medium.  Continuing in this manner the finished product didn’t need any further protection and could be kept dust-free with a gently swipe of a damp cloth.

Then I plunged into collecting thrown-away gift wrap paper and began making paper from junk-mail.  The wonderful colors of the roses in my garden provided me with piles of beautiful petals that retained their color and I soon had a large glass container of  dried rose petals.  I discovered raffia was made of twisted tissue paper and began collecting used and thrown-away-a- parties raffia. Thin, diaphanous fabric also joined the pile..  The silk strands on cobs of corn were too beautiful to toss out and they were added to the growing collection of dried recyclables in my studio.
With these colorful textures provided by various means I began to ‘paint’ with them on large canvases enjoying the contrasts in texture with the thin tissue paper that could be sculpted and ‘mooshed’ around  wher ever I wanted it to go.  By piling on the colored textures as thick as possible, I found they formed their own shadows—thus, bas relief painting..  This was the greatest fun I’d ever had painting with paper.

Ah! But you might say, “That’s not paper, that’s trash.” The Egyptians didn’t consider these elements ‘trash’ for the very word “Paper” comes from papyrus and Webster’s Dictionary defines PAPER as follows:
“Thin material made of cellulose pulp derived mainly from wood, rags, certain grasses processed into flexible leaves or rolls by deposit from an aqueous suspension and used mainly for writing, printing, drawing, painting, wrapping, and covering walls.”

With no limitations in sight in the manipulation and creative use of what is usually thrown out, do con sider your own toss-aways and how they could be re-created into something useful and beautiful.  With the in ternational call of Green Art ringing across the globe,  I can hardly wait to fashion new elements in new and unexplored ways.  (Yes, I’ve heard that there is no original thought….but in my own studio who would know?)