New 2010 paper work by Ray Tomasso during the casting process.
Ray Tomasso and the Art of Paper
Ray Tomasso has enjoyed a distinguished and noteworthy forty-year career that stretches back to the time when he first began to work with handmade paper. However, his interest in art goes back even further than that.
Born in 1949 in Omaha, Nebraska, Tomasso began taking art classes as a child at the city’s internationally renowned Joslyn Art Museum and it was then that he dedicated his life to fine art. Ultimately Tomasso would earn a BFA at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and he subsequently did graduate work at a variety of institutions in the Midwest including Michigan State University and Southern Illinois University.
He was first exposed to handmade paper in 1968 when he saw a print that was done on paper that was an inch thick, and then became intrigued by the medium. “I had been disappointed in the low relief that’s possible with etching and so I was already doing embossed Raku pieces,” says Tomasso, “but I realized that paper was more durable than clay.” The exposure sparked his interest in learning more about paper. A few years later, having met Garner Tullis, the founder of the International Institute of Experimental Printmaking, Tomasso began experimenting with paper pulp, creating his first sculptures with the material in 1973.
Then in 1977 he came West—and thus became a part of the Colorado art scene, remaining in the area permanently. That year he entered the graduate program in fine arts at the University of Colorado at Boulder working as a graduate printmaking assistant and in that capacity became a protégé of printmaker Clinton Cline. Tomasso earned his MFA at C.U. in 1979.
Despite all his previous fine art training, Tomasso turned to working with handmade paper and for that pursuit he had no specific guidance, and he therefore needed to teach himself how to do it. “I thought, ‘how hard could it be if people had been doing it for two thousand years?’, Tomasso says with a laugh, “and this was obviously a mistake because traditional techniques are actually very hard to master.” Thus he began many decades of intensive study into the history and techniques of traditional handmade European and American styles of papermaking. To do that he needed to travel internationally and in the process became involved with a range of professional organizations.
Based on his background in printmaking and ceramics, Tomasso invented a method of making paper-works that no one else was doing. The common practice was for paper artists to use raw pulp that is colored and then pressed into molds. Instead, Tomasso uses sheets of wet paper that are applied to a mold in layers.
To produce his pieces, Tomasso works as both artisan and artist. As an artisan, he produces sheets of handmade paper beginning with used cotton rags and scraps of archival rag board. These are reduced to their basic fibers through beating in a Hollander. The resulting pulp is formed in sheets on wire screens, or paper moulds. Instead of being pressed and dried to produce sheets of paper, however, the wet paper is then laid over a relief mold, or what Tomasso refers to as “collages” constructed of cardboard, neon tubes, pages of brail, and pieces of metal and stone. Using this method, Tomasso must think in a manner similar to printmaking, since both the image and the relief must be conceived in reverse with the final product being a mirror image of the mold. Since the molds need to be dismantled to free the paper, they can only be used once, though their components can be recycled indefinitely. The pieces are then sanded and painted using primarily natural pigments, and finally sealed with acrylic mediums and lacquers.
His works in paper are almost always abstract, an approach he first embraced in the late 1970s, though he has worked with representational imagery in other mediums. These abstracts are vaguely constructivist with roughly rectilinear forms colliding in the picture plane. And they are also quasi narrative. “Basically I’m trying to reproduce the essence of my aspirations over time,” muses Tomasso. “It’s like opening a drawer and seeing what’s inside. The only relationship the things in the drawer have to one another is that they are all in it together. My ‘collages’ are like that.”
The 1970s was the start of a golden age for art made from cast paper, and Tomasso with his extensive practice was well positioned to ride this rising wave of interest. Not only was it a time when some artists like Tomasso who were dedicated to creating exclusively with paper had come to the fore, but also when artists working in other mediums like painting also embraced the method including the likes of Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Noland and David Hockney.
Over the years, Tomasso has widely exhibited his work throughout the country and around the world. As a result his work appears in hundreds of collections – private, public and corporate. Thus it would be no exaggeration to say that he’s the most important artist in Colorado working in the medium today.
Michael Paglia