Origins

About a month ago I had a child. I have found that this is pretty hard work. It is also very time consuming. I am constantly "at the ready;" at any given moment I must be prepared to drop everything and do one of three things 1) sooth a crying baby 2) wipe fecal matter and urine from a baby's butt 3) help my wife in any number of ways. Because of my constant on-call status I am unable to partake in my #1 favorite hobby: being up to my elbows in glue and newspaper. I will start back up again as soon as possible.

In the meantime, I was paging through some old photo albums and came across some pics of art projects from years ago. Some of these involved paper mache. These were all done before I began taking the art seriously and well before I stumbled upon my main inspirations Dan Reeder and Louie Rochon.

Firstly, we have some pinatas. These are classic paper mache projects that everyone has made at some point. Back in college I made these for my nephew's birthdays; one was an alien themed party and the other was a race car themed party.

As a teenager, we decided to prepare a Halloween display for my house. Of course, in typical teenager fashion, we decided this on October 30th. So while this is high concept it is low quality. This was back when X-Files was big and Fox had just released the Alien Autopsy special. The idea of our display was that the kids would approach the autopsy scene and take the candy from the dissected alien's abdomen. Despite the crudeness of the display it was a hit with the neighborhood kids.

In the past few years I have really taken paper mache seriously. But it is fun to look back on these old projects from before I knew what I was doing.