Dan Paulos - His Is a Paper Mission for Faith

ALMOST ANY ROOM in Dan Paulos' house could easily be in a cathedral. Stained glass windows from St. Michael's Catholic Church in Buffalo, N,Y,m are built into the living room's window frames, muting sunlight into dusky blues, reds and greens.

The kitchen walls boast manuscripts, some hundreds of years old, from Italian, Spanish and English monks. The hallways host habit rosaries from nuns he has known since his Catholic school days.

In the library, frankincense and myrrh weave with the strong vibrato of Joan Baez's voice. In this room, Paulos, an Albuquerque artist, researches the subjects for his paper cuttings.

But tucked away in the corner of the house, past the flickering candles and behind the looming pipe organ, is the studio where Paulos spends most of his time.

In here, clear windows allow sunlight to stream onto worktables scattered with cuttings and a desktop strewn with mail. Perched on a drafting table is the latest drawing that Paulos will chip and cut into a vivid web. Under the table is an Oriental rug on which he kneels to carve his designs. Its tomato red and gold contrasts the stark black and white composition of his work.

There is little to keep him company in his work compartment, save the drawings leaned against the wall, waiting to be cut. There is little noise to disturb him except for occasional bells and shouts from the construction crew on his street.

Paulos, wakes at 5 most mornings to craft intricate patterns with minimal equipment. He is more concerned with the perfection of his work than with the extravagance of his tools. He remembers buying the paper years ago in New York City; it is black on the front and white on the back. A thin, fluid sheet is so fragile that it drapes gracefully over his arm, yet so strong that threads of it can hold together an entire design. With this paper, a pair of household shears and a No. 2 lead pencil with half its stem sharpened away and half its eraser rubbed down, Paulos spends about eight hours a day creating elaborate Madonna scenes held together by paper slivers and strings.

Paulos first draws his sketch in reverse on the white side of the paper, a process that took him about a year to master. Then he cuts away the white that is not a part of the design. When he is through cutting, he flips the paper skeleton. He then glues the black form onto white paper.

Some works are mostly black with only chips and chunks of white cut away. From others Paulos has removed most of the white and left only fragile halos and flimsy flower garlands to coax the paper into a graceful image.

"It's impossible to visualize," Paulos said, referring his difficulty in explaining his creations.

"It looks as if you've done something with pen and ink. You can't visualize how, if you took the black away from the white, the white is by itself, and the black is just hanging in your hand."

Paulos traces the art form to the Chinese, who used stones to chip patterns in the paper they invented 2,000 years ago. From China, paper cutting techniques traveled to Europe and then to America, Paulos said.

Paulos painted with acrylics for 10 years before becoming an avid paper cutter in 1985. His paintings had the same pen-and-ink effect of the cuttings, but he said he prefers cutting to the technical touching up of linework in painting.

"I switched over to the cutting and I can whip them up really quickly and get basically the same image and the same technical quality," he said. Paulos cuts a design in a day or two after spending as much as two weeks to plan it.

Paulos is softspoken but serious about both his art and the one subject he includes in every cutting, the Madonna.

Influenced in his youth by nuns who emphasized devotion to the Virgin Mary, Paulos now devotes all of his artistry to the subject. He has difficulty comprehending how an art form he learned in eighth grade at St. Boniface Catholic School in Sioux City, Iowa, has become a way of life.

"To think that you can take a piece of paper and cut and cut and cut and end up with a picture... it must be God working because I can't understand it," Paulos said, resting his hand on the side of his face.

Paulos was first inspired by the cuttings of Sister Mary Jean Dorcy, of the Dominicans of the Holy Cross, who wrote books about paper cuttings in the 1950s. Paulos remembers how the flowing veils in her Madonna cuttings had moved him when he first saw them in poster form in the classroom.

Knowing that the boy was intrigued, a nun asked Paulos to try his hand at cutting likenesses of Sister Dorcy's posters. Paulos' first experience was messy; he was unfamiliar with the tools and knicked his hands when he used his father's double-edged razor. But his teacher was able to salvage the bloodspotted cutting, and Paulos fell in love with the art form. Although he did not cut on a regular basis until 1985, he recalls cutting hundreds of silhouettes of family and friends in past years.

Paulos met Sister Dorcy through the Brothers of the Good Shepherd in Albuquerque. He moved to Albuquerque in the mid-1960s to join the brothers, but left after nearly 10 years. He decided he was a more effective "quiet missionary" through his art.

"I think the role of the Catholic artist may be, in a quiet way, to convert a person," Paulos said. "Not so much to Catholicism, but to love of God and His Mother."

Despite the variety of subjects, all his cuttings have the characteristic branches and lattices that symbolize a network his art has been between himself and his Catholic artist friends, mentors and his religion.

About 90 percent of his original cuttings have been gifts to museums, churches and friends in Ireland, Chile, El Salvador, Germany, France and Canada.

Paulos supposes he could make a living cutting paper, but he maintains a full-time job "to relax."

Most of his works contain serious themes, but Paulos is not above lightheartedness.

A friend had suggested he do a cutting of some of his favorite subjects. Paulos thought of his nun friends and the Dr Pepper commercials. As a result, he is creating a "Dr Pepper Nun" cutting that features one of his school teachers, a Sister of Christian Charity, complete with the bonnet and bow habit, kneeling with a bottle of the soda in hand, gazing skyward and asking, "Lord, might I be a Pepper, too?"