Paul Rousso Selected Press
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Index Page 4
Beautiful/Decay
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CollectingCandy.com
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E-Junkie.info
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LexJet
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Trend Hunter Art & Design
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News & Records Greensboro.com
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Duggal
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Amazing Life-Sized Crumpled Paper Sculptures By Paul Rousso
What do you do with candy wrappers, old not-acollector's-edition comics, old newspapers, etc., discard them, right? For artist Paul Rousso discarded candy wrappers, money, comics, newspaper, magazine pages, etc. are art but only when created life-sized. Paul Rousso who has worked both as an art director and freelance illustrator for big brands like Revlon, Clairol, CondĂŠ Nast, and Bloomingdale's creates realistic, life-sized crumpled paper sculptures by moulding acrylic into folds and creases of paper 8
then paints it to look like its been actually crumpled and discarded. "My latest works involve any and all documents. They are created ascetically and without regard to specific documents. The subject is the paper, and the paper is the paint. I always felt it was more like painting than doing a collage. Different papers and inks do different things, and in that I have found a new language. My voice as it were", Rousso shares on his website. Scroll down to be mesmerized by Rousso's creations: Happy viewing!
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AMERICAN CURRENCY PAUL ROUSSO
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“At the end of the next paragraph I’m going to treat myself to a bag of M&Ms,” I’d tell myself. It had been hours of college reading, and my brain needed a bribe to keep me going, chocolate! The problem was, I worked for tips at the time, and never seemed to have a good bill. I’d stand there, not very patiently, once, twice, four, five times, inserting my wrinkly bill into the machine, waiting to hear it process, then the REJECT motor would start up and I’d be face to face with that darn bill again. Oh the torture, can I just have my rescuing melt in your mouth not in your hand at B5 already?! American artist Paul Russo has created his own collection of crumpled up currency. What a cool project this is! Ramped up to giant proportions, the dollar bill art hang on the wall measuring 4 by 6. They are made by a process of infusing plexiglass with heat, then shaping and distorting. The super sized money includes all the official markings as the real thing. They appear incredibly believable, accept for the problem that you’d never get one of those to fit in your wallet.
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In the words of the artist, “…After hundreds of years of he printed word, ink on paper, is on it’s way out… Soon there will be no new magazines, no newspapers, no new books, everyone will have their reader, I-pad etc., to which they can download whatever they want, whenever they want, where ever they are. The last paper and ink to go away will likely be our paper currency.”
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Digital Finger Painting Meet Charlotte’s own Paul Rousso, who combines photography, wide-format printing on canvas, collages, and acrylic finger painting for one of the most unique art applications on the planet. Armed with a Canon 5D and a wide-format printer, Paul Rousso became one dangerous artist. Rousso was already dangerous, with his own ripped, twisted, and torn version of art that was unlike anything else around. “For years, I collaged on canvas. I would squeegee all this paper on canvas and once I got the composition I liked – like big crowd scenes torn from different newspapers and magazines – I would then varnish the heck out of it and overpaint the whole thing. This was my gallery and commission work for a long time,” explains Rousso.
Then, about five years ago, Rousso purchased a 64in. printer and everything changed… Well, almost everything. Rousso’s collaged vision of people and places would continue, but the production method would shift from hand-torn collages to collages captured, rendered, and printed digitally. 12
Corporate Portraits When a staffing company in Atlanta approached him with a commission for their annual report, Rousso recalls that he told them (paraphrasing, of course), “Hey! You’re in luck! I do these things really large. We can get a transparency shot, and you can use it for the cover of your annual report. And, if you pay me more money, you can own the original, which will look awesome in your office.”
“I realized that corporate portraits could be a product for me. Nothing really happened commercially until I came up the corporate portrait concept,” says Rousso. Instead of making the typical canned presentation with his portfolio under one arm, Rousso comes armed with a full-size canvas print of his work, unrolls it on the table, and lets the size, scope, and sheer creativity sell the piece. “I come in like a rug salesman with a big roll of canvas. The old cliché artist portfolio of ‘let me flick through some pages here’ just doesn’t cut it with these 20-foot pieces that are reduced down into a portfolio so you can’t see anything. If I can get in a room with a CEO who loves his company, I’ll close the sale,” says Rousso. “I started to get good at photography as well, and the digital world caught up with me in size and quality, which was 13
important, because these things are huge. Now I can capture things where you can see the hairs in your eyebrows, if you want to, and I have a machine that can put the image underneath, and give me an incredible base to work with.”
And that’s how Rousso’s canvas creations work. His digitally photographed collages are printed on LexJet’s Sunset Select Matte Canvas, and covered with a glaze of Golden’s medium varnish. Rousso then mixes paints to match the colors found in the corporate portrait, and smears the paint into the varnish.
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"I look at the areas I plan to hit on that particular day and mix up a palette of all the variable colors. I dunk my finger in the varnish, smear a puddle on the canvas, then stick my finger in the paint and finger paint into that wet varnish. It’s made up of, for lack of a better term, these color-correct smears. I put down some paint and start pushing it around and smearing it and the colors begin to blend. Acrylic dries almost instantly, so you get a couple of chances to move it around for a second or two, and another second or two to wipe it off. Once it’s dry, that’s it,” explains Russo. They say genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent luck, or something like that, and Rousso hit upon the winning process by literally hitting the canvas. “For years I tried to do this with other instruments; I varnished with brushes, for instance, and it just didn’t work. In anger I gave up, and smacked the canvas with my hand, and then I saw what I had been wanting to see all along. If you 15
could stick your finger into your print and just kind of smear the color that’s there; that’s what I want it to look like,” he says. Rousso prints almost all of his work, except when the project exceeds his printer’s size capabilities, such as a multi-piece mural he created for the Charlotte Bobcats’ arena. Those 15-foot-tall pieces were printed by a local company that runs 16-footwide billboard printers. Rousso could see fear in their eyes when he asked to be involved in the printing process. They were expecting a temperamental artiste who would throw production into chaos. Instead, they found a knowledgeable and easy-to-work-with artist with loads of experience and skill in the printing process. The project went off without a hitch, and Rousso had his artwork in a very public place, sure to build more recognition and business. “I’ve been waiting for this level of digital printing. About 12 years ago some salesman came to my studio and was trying to hawk a crummy version of the Epson – the dots were huge, and if you touched the print, it smeared. I rolled my eyes and just waited,” recalls Rousso. “The idea that years later I have this machine that far beats the pants off of what I was piddling around with then is amazing. For the canvas I print to, I tried a few places and I couldn’t believe they had the nerve to send me that stuff. Then I stumbled into LexJet, though you may have found me, and I started using Sunset Select Matte Canvas. It’s a wee bit more expensive, but it’s so much better that the price becomes irrelevant.” Rousso’s latest digital and acrylic multi-media spark of genius involves rubbing the paper down to the 16
ink so that only the ink remains in a flowing and undulating piece of acrylic. Rousso explains: “I’ve figured out a way to take a digital print and insert it into a slab of clear acrylic paint, minus the paper. It’s all about taking the ink from the print and being left with a slab of acrylic with the ink in it so you can sculpt it to make it look like a melted piece of glass. It can be really tricky. You take a gel medium, flatten out a glob of it, put a print face down into the gel, squeegee it, let it dry solid, and then come back and scrub away the paper. "I’ve been using Epson matte paper because, of the photo papers I’ve experimented with so far, it’s worked best since it’s thinner and easier to rub away. You rub the paper down until it gets to a point where you can pull away pieces of the whole thing in one shot. It’s a very tedious process of rubbing away the paper by soaking it with water; it’s like the beer label you peel when you’re talking to a girl at the bar. "Then you layer clear acrylic onto the back of that, add more until it’s as thick as needed, and paint the back white to emulate the white of the paper. Then you pull it up and the other side is a slick glassmlike acrylic image. I sculpt this and apply it to a wooden panel. Then you’ve got the print on this sheet of acrylic; it’s a flimsy, rubbery thing you can mess with. It takes gallons of acrylic to do anything of any size.”
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Paul Rousso Displays Amplified American Cash as Artwork Inspired by artists like Cezanne who shocked viewers of their times, artist Paul Rousso wants to portray something as ordinary as American cash as something extraordinary. He takes photographs of crumpled up American currency covered in dirt and grime and blows them up into large-scale portraits that emphasize every line and detail in the bills. Over time, with multiple exchanges, this collection of American money has become discolored, disfigured and generally altered a great deal from its original pristine condition. No one knows all of the sights these bills have seen, all the adventures they went through and the various people, from drug dealers to millionaires, that handled them. Paul Rousso entices people to see dirty American cash as creative artwork. Stats for Crumpled US Currency Captures Trending: Older & Chilly Traction: 1,231 clicks in 104 w Interest: 1.6 minutes Concept: American Cash Related: 85 examples / 65 photos Segment: Neutral, 12-55 Comparison Set: 31 similar articles, including: crafty currency exhibits, priceless presidential defacing, and embellished dollar jewelry.
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Museum unveils Greensboro's newest piece of public art
The Greensboro Children’s Museum unveiled this morning a mural of 26 twisted plexiglass sheets that represents the newest public art downtown and a gift that honors the man known as the Wizard of Greensboro’s Oz. The Oz is the children’s museum, and the wizard is the late Jerry Hyman. Jerry, a retired builder and a grandfather with six grandchildren and three step grandchildren, helped create the museum. He spent 13 years going to nearly 30 children’s museums nationwide and in Europe where he fished for ideas that he thought 19
would work. He donated $336,000 and coaxed civic leader Cynthia Doyle to lead a fundraising campaign. By May 1999, Jerry saw his dream -- his Oz -- open in a former car dealership downtown across from the Central Library. “Don’t just complain,’’ he often told his three children. “Suggest a better way.’’ Jerry died in March after suffering a stroke last year. He was 90. Since his death, his three children looked for a way to honor their father, the man who would take them to the S&W Cafeteria downtown as kids and talk about the need for tolerance and respect. His three children are now in the 50s. Michael, the oldest, is a sales executive for a computer firm in New Jersey; Mark is a well-known dentist in Greensboro; and Linda Hyman Strauss is a communications director for the federal Environmental Protection Agency. Their childhood along Hobbs Road is way in their rear view mirror. But they remember. Their dad turned their home into a playground, and he saw play as necessary, no matter if it was an empty refrigerator box and a slew of crayons. So, to honor their father, they gave the museum the money, and the museum bought the mural from Charlotte artist Paul Rousso, a longtime family friend. The Hyman family and the museum won’t say how much the piece cost other than Rousso gave them an “extraordinary price.’’ His mural was unveiled Monday as part of Greensboro’s 17Days Arts and Cultural Festival. Rousso gets big bucks for his artwork nationwide, 20
and it hangs in galleries from New York to Los Angeles. This time, his piece will hang in the front room of the Greensboro Children’s Museum forever. It’s big. It’s 16-feet across, 8-feet wide, with 26 individual plexiglass sheets that show the rainbow of childhood: a Tootsie Pop wrapper, comic superheroes wrapper, pages from children’s books, a Pokemon card, a Wizard of Oz poster and artwork from three local kids, the children of Mark and Anita Hyman. You can’t miss it. Walk in the museum and look right. Or at night, pass North Church Street, peer through the museum’s big windows, and see under at least five spotlights Thor, Dorothy, Curious George and Sam I Am from “Green Eggs and Ham.’’ But really, watch kids. On Monday after the black curtain was removed and the people had spoken, three kids no older than 3 went straight to the folded plexiglass and starting touching it to see if it was real. Rousso calls it “A Piece For Pop.’’ Jerry’s three children called him Pop. As people filed out Monday and as kids lingered around the 26 pieces of plexiglass, Michael Hyman stopped and talked with Marian King, the museum’s CEO. Michael is flying back to New Jersey tonight. He needs to get back to work at Hewlett-Packard. But when he comes back to Greensboro, he told King he knows right where he’ll go to remember his Pop. “A lot of people visit a cemetery,’’ he told her. “I can visit my dad here.’’
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Artist Torches, Stretches Candy Wrappers for Halloween-Inspired ArtPrize Entry
Using flamethrowers and the help of three dudes in fireproof suits, 54-year-old Paul Rousso constructed a pretty sweet mural. With additional help from candy history and packaging guru Jason Liebig, the Charlotte, N.C. artist collected current and vintage candy wrappers for a 30×9-foot acrylic collage titled, November 1st. He told the Charlotte Observer the idea “just sort of unconsciously” came to him as he had been working with currency and felt a lack of color. “Then on some level this popped into my head. I thought immediately that it looks just like my 22
kitchen table on November 1 after my son’s done on Halloween,” he said. Fair enough. After heating the wrappers to insane temperatures, Rousso – working against the clock – stretched and twisted them into form. “You work with it while it’s hot,” he told the Observer. “You’ve got 20-30 seconds to manipulate it and then you’re done.” As if tracking down candy wrappers dating as far back as the ‘50s, torching them and then sculpting them while hot wasn’t bold enough, the final piece was also an ordeal. After entering November 1st in the international ArtPrize competition, Rousso loaded a 15-foot truck with 80 sculptures and drove north to Grand Rapids, Mich. for the contest. Using a photograph of the arrangement as a guide, he said the installation was “like hanging 80 pictures on the wall and hanging them at angles that are just right.” Unfortunately, Rousso didn’t win at ArtPrize…His only regret, though? – “I wish I had another 30 feet” for more wrappers, he told the Observer. “I catch all kinds of hell for leaving out this, that and the other.”
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