A few years ago when I first got on the Internet, I noticed all these fascinating
noms de guerre people had created for themselves… names like “Lips2Sweet4U” and “2L8_4myLuv” for the girls, which, once I thought about it, really made me feel pre-rejected by people I didn’t even know and whose lips I had no interest in anyway; or names like “superSTUD4babes” and “Guy2Hot2Handle” for guys with some serious superiority complexes, which, for some neurotic reason, made me feel surprisingly inferior. For a long time I humbly went by… well, Jim Bohannon. Nothing like using your real name to throw people off! There came a time, however – a fateful time – when I decided I should set up yet a second Yahoo! account, and since my real name was already taken and I was already having to use it with the number “1” attached to it, instead of going for Jim_Bohannon2 (and since “studmuffin879” was also already taken and I had little interest in trying to remember “studmuffin880”) I decided I’d call myself something that represented me to the core. So Maché_Artist it was (Maché is pronounced “mah-shay…some people have trouble figuring it out).
Why would any self-respecting, net-surfing e-mail hopper name himself after a French adjective that literally means “chewed up”? Simple. I love paper maché. When I was boy I discovered a recipe in
The Family Book of Games, which I had gotten in an introductory package from Doubleday Book Club (which I had inadvertently forgotten to tell my mama I’d sent off for…but that’s another story). Well, I didn’t care much about soaking strips of paper in a galvanized washtub, boiling them down, and beating them to a pulp. I decided what I would do is tear newspaper (and we always had a stack) into tiny pieces and stick them together with glue made from flour and water. I used this method to make toys for myself. The first thing I made was a very detailed Lunar Excursion Model (LEM) which stood about 5 inches tall and actually came apart so I could both land on the moon and take off from it. The poor LEM – after dozens of landings on the dining room table (aka “the moon” – the white tablecloth was perfect), I hopped off the couch one afternoon forgetting about the lander, and it met with a cataclysmic force from my foot, rendering all future moon explorations unfeasible.
In later years I began to wonder if I could make art with this method, so I began gluing these pieces of paper together to make more detailed works, including an elephant complete with tusks and a long-neck, cartoonish turtle. As the years went by, I made various starts and stops with this art form until I decided to pulverize paper in a blender and mix it with flour and water to make a moldable mash. This worked very well, and my skill increased, until I had a bout with clinical depression and gave up art for a while. Recently I have returned to my passion for sculpting in paper mâché with the enthusiasm of a teenager who’s just discovered girls (maybe that’s a bad analogy, but you get the picture). I made a half-hearted attempt to do some things with clay, but it left me uninspired – and it also cracks very easily.
The problem with working in paper mâché, at least the method of building from scratch that I use, is it takes lots of time. Each meager stage of production has to dry completely before I go on, so keeping the motivation for major projects such as I have in progress now requires lots of patience – and it’s perfect for somebody with a short attention span, because I can work on a piece, then set it aside for days and work on something else. It’s a marathon, not a sprint, so it takes endurance, coupled with downright mule-headedness, to keep going. I've also had to change the recipe – I no longer use flour, because those same beetles that love breakfast cereal also love flour...even when it's mixed with pulverized paper. Now I use Elmer's glue, which makes an incredibly strong product when dry, and an incredibly sticky mess while in progress, but one must suffer for one's art.
Something that I really like about my art medium of preference is that I take trash (literally) and turn it into a work of art. There is something profound in that for me – it’s a metaphor, much like what I try to do in my other job as a teacher of inmates at a state prison. Where you see trash to be dropped off at the dump, I see dragons lifting their wings to fly, Civil War soldiers haggard from war, frogs playing musical instruments on lily pads, a country baseball pitcher in mid-windup, and…well, lots of possibilities.
So…I figured that would be the perfect “other name” for myself. How appropriate, because life has a way of leaving us mâché-ed (chewed up) and spit out, and I’m no exception. It’s just that I want to take the chewed-up experience and turn it into something beautiful – and if not exactly beautiful, at least a whole lot of fun!
[I've included a couple of pictures here – an older work (a dragon perched on a rock) and a piece in progress, Dragonlock Holmes, who will sport, when completed, a trenchcoat and the typical Sherlockian cap, and will hold a magnifying glass in one hand and a Calabash pipe in the other.]
It all begins here...with paper. Big sheets torn repeatedly, or cut into tiny pieces with scissors, until I have the raw material to begin shaping into what my head visualizes (but not entirely...the paper has a will of its own and comprimises must continually be made).
This is tedious work, but the results are even beautiful before the process of gluing pieces of paper together begins. Shapes and sizes and colors yield an appealing texture that never ceases to thrill and fascinate me.
I need a variety of sizes. The smallest pieces -- about 1/8 of an inch -- are for forming more precise shapes. I have returned to a process of gluing pieces of paper together, one by one, and working the shape as I go. Everything I do is freehand. I go from the paper chips you see to the eventual shapes using only the air for an armature. The only exceptions are the occasional rolled tube that establishes the form of a leg or arm on a creature. Dragons are my favorite subjects, and I have a variety of characters in the works. 
