“Well, one idea leads to another.”
That’s the modest reply you’ll get from artist Paula Renee if you ask her where she gets her inspiration. The talented, multi-media artist from Danbury, Connecticut has been known to incorporate a variety of disparate elements into her art, including scrap telephone wires she talked an AT&T repairman into giving her. (She wrapped the wire with yarn and twisted them into different shapes or used them in an ancient Ghiordes knot that she wove into the warp on her loom). Some narrow rubber hose her husband thoughtfully retrieved from curbside did not go to waste. (He had a hunch she could use them). She’s even recycled small scraps of wood left behind by her late father, a master marquetry craftsman.
The reuse, recycling and rebirth of everyday objects are among Paula’s favorite ways of imbuing her work with unexpected nuances. She’s also been known to combine two mediums, such as painting and weaving, by cutting up her paintings and weaving them back together on her loom. Whatever the medium, Paula excels in reinterpreting the natural world around her in a riot of color that upends the traditional color wheel in a radiant, dazzling celebration of life.
Dimensional Trees
Paula had been transforming painted, torn and sculpted papers into abstract work for a number of years. One day, at a New Jersey gallery where her work was exhibited, she overheard a woman say to her friend, “Oh, look—that artist paints on bark.”
“Of course, it wasn’t bark at all, but gouache on watercolor paper, torn and shaped,” thought Paula. “But the comment led me to wonder—if it looked like bark, then those must be trees and all I need to do is add leaves!”
Paula’s first dimensional tree, measuring 40” x 60”, sold at its very first exhibit, at Gallery at 211 in Ossining.
“That told me I was onto something, so I kept experimenting with different sizes. The pieces kept getting more dimensional and more layered,” she said.
Paula began creating her dimensional trees in earnest. While some of her trees feature earthy browns and olive greens, others shine with shimmery, silvery, iridescent blues and greens, saturated coral and bold magenta. Over 100 dimensional trees ranging in sizes up to 36” x 80” have now been sold to private and public collections throughout the United States and abroad.
Dimensional Flowers
It wasn’t long before Paula applied this same dimensional technique to flower art. Soon, flowers began springing up in her studio and throughout her living space ?– flowers in a field, flowers in a vase or flowers simply standing alone.
Deft With a Weft: Woven Paintings
Paula continues to create her dimensional tree and flower pieces while also painting, photographing and weaving. But her art continues to evolve as her fascination with cross-fertilizing different mediums grows. When an art consultant asked her if she could weave—with paper strips—she promptly said yes. She decided to enliven new pieces with the dimensional techniques she used in her tree and flower series.
To create a woven painting, Paula starts with a gouache or acrylic on paper or acrylic or oil on canvas. If it’s paper, she tears it into long, thin vertical strips of between a half inch and an inch wide; if it’s canvas, she’ll cut it. Then she’ll weave these vertical strips through the warp on the loom.
“I like to change the juxtaposition of the strips so that some are positioned higher or lower than the other pieces,” said Paula. “It results in an irregular design. Once I used strips from two different paintings and wove them into the warp, first from one painting, then from the other. It really abstracted it.”
Early Successes
Paula credits special people in her life who helped encourage in her a lifelong love of art, from the grade school principal who pulled her out of class so she could paint murals in the hallways to the pastor of her church who urged her to create banners that were displayed in the church during different holiday periods and carried by the church youth group in a parade.
Paula used one of those church banners when, in the late 1970s, she applied to participate in a CETA Artist-in-Residence program in Hackensack, New Jersey. The federally-funded program supplied the artists with the materials they needed and paid them an income while they worked in a huge studio space, interacting with one another and displaying their work. That year-long experience allowed her to work side-by-side with 30 other promising artists, including two tapestry artists whose work so impressed Paula that when the residency was over, she stopped making banners, bought a loom and started creating tapestries.
Paula has exhibited in New York at the Michael Ingbar Gallery, Reece Galleries, the former National Craft Showroom, Shippee Gallery and in the Hemisphere Club on the top floor of the Time-Life building. She’s also shown at the Hudson River Museum, Trenton City Museum, Hopper House Foundation in Nyack, Bergen Museum of Art and Long Beach Island Foundation for the Arts. Traveling exhibitions include Courthouse Galleries of the Portsmouth Museums in Virginia, Cultural Arts Center at Glen Allen, Appalachian Center for Crafts, Smithville, Tennessee and Longwood Center for the Visual Arts in Farmville, Virginia.
She has been commissioned to create numerous tapestries and woven paintings for public, corporate and private collections worldwide.
Career Highlights
All told, Paula has created over 1,700 works (since she started counting), some of which are in the collections of the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India, Chicago’s Sheraton Hotel, Stouffers Resort in Palm Springs, California and AT&T in New York and Princeton, New Jersey.
One of the highlights of her career was the creation of an appliqued tapestry with hand-dyed silk in the mid-1980s for the Jewish chapel at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. She collaborated with the late Sidney Simon, who taught at the Art Students League. He created line drawings of the Tree of Life and explained to her the meaning of important Jewish symbolic references, such as the 12 Tribes.
She’s also very proud of the pieces she created for the Tobu Hotel in Kinshicho, Japan, in 1997. Her woven paintings were hung in the Presidential Suite and 17 of their lobbies.
“Each lobby displayed five pieces, so I called them ‘pentaploids,’ Paula explains. “The theme of the series was ‘Music is the international language.’”
Paula also created two commissioned tapestries (“Global Connections”) for the lobby of GE Capital in Stamford, Connecticut in the late 1990s. Each one measures 96” high x 60” wide and depicts famous international landmarks.
Current and Upcoming Exhibitions
You can catch Paula’s art now through the end of June at the Blue Hill Cultural Center in Pearl River. She’ll also be exhibiting at the While Silo Winery in Sherman, Connecticut for three weeks in September.
Some of her work is always on display at PS Gallery, on the Green in Litchfield, Connecticut and at the Barn Gallery in New Fairfield, Connecticut. This will be her fourteenth year showing work at the annual Hospice fundraiser hosted by Boehringer Ingelheim Corporation in Ridgefield, Connecticut this June.
You can see more of her work by visiting her blog.
Woman Around Town’s Six Questions (Connecticut)
Favorite Place to Eat: Plain Jane’s in Bethel.
Favorite place to shop: Trader Joe’s in Danbury.
Favorite Connecticut Sight: Main Street in Ridgefield with its holiday lights and horse and buggy rides.
Favorite Connecticut Moment: Enjoying the view from my studio windows.
What You Love About Connecticut: Always something to do, some place to go in the arts.
What You Hate About Connecticut: So many choices, so little time.
Dawn Handschuh has earned a living putting pen to paper for 30 years. She is a freelance writer, blogger and former journalist.
