Dan Paulos - Snipping His Way To Heaven

Although his cuttings of the Virgin and Child, in fact, not paper dolls at all - are published in religious books and periodicals around the world, Paulos keeps a low profile in Albuquerque. "No one in New Mexico knows who I am," he says modestly, his cherubic cheeks poofing in a shy smile. He would rather not deal with publicity, preferring instead to spend mornings in the studio of his Northeast Heights house, his pudgy fingers thrust into the too-small finger holes in one of his four pairs of scissors, snipping away until his fingers practically turn purple.

On one recent morning he had just finished cutting out an image of the Virgin Mary as she sat in front of a Zia, wearing a leather-fringed dress and cradling the baby Jesus. Paulos works with paper that is white on one side and black on the other. He sketches his design on the white side, then cuts the reverse of it on the black. He cuts away the areas he wants to be white and leaves the black paper wherever he wants a shadow or an outline. Paulos doesn't use pen or ink, only paper and scissors. Curves the thickness of a strand of hair outlining the clouds around the madonna's head are really threads of paper.

Paulos puts down his scissors and picks up the Virgin by the toe. The entire picture follows. "A lot of people don't believe that it's just one piece," he says.

Almost all of Paulos's cuttings have something to do with the Virgin Mary. "I think she's the most universal female figure in the world," he says. His madonnas come in all shapes and sizes. "Our Lady Of New Mexico," for example, is an Indian woman wearing long, dark braids and a traditional Pueblo dress. She towers over the Taos Pueblo with her arms outstretched to embrace the half dozen hot-air balloons floating by.

His personal favorite is the "Madonna of the Slaughtered Jews." A tired lady in front of a swastika watches sadly as a row of men march to their death.

His charitable nature, and his fascination with madonnas, comes from having been a monk for 10 years. He left the monastery 12 years ago when he became disillusioned with church politics. He's still as faithful as ever.

Paulos still loves the church. In fact, his house looks like one. Stained glass windows from a church in New York have been installed in his living room. He recently bought an organ from a Presbyterian church in Taos. He knocked a hole in the wall separating the living room from one of the bedrooms where he has set up the pipes. More than a dozen antique nun rosaries made of everything from petrified cherries to coffee beans are displayed around the house. His walls are literally covered with religious art, some of it his own, most of it from his mentors.

Sister Mary Jean Dorcy, his teacher, was a world-famous paper cutter when Paulos was still a boy attending a Catholic school in Iowa. He wrote to her, and to his surprise she wrote back. She was impressed by his interest and sent him one of her cuttings and asked him to copy it. He couldn't figure out how to cut it, so he made a painting of it and sent it back. "It was horrible," he said. But Sister Mary Jean liked it and encouraged him to keep working.

But painting was tedious. It would take Paulos up to 40 hours to paint something that Sister Mary Jean cut out in an hour. He eventually saw the wisdom of her ways and traded his paint brushes for scissors.

Paulos accepts, from time to time, one -man aart exhibits. But sometimes, because he is a shy, polite man, he feels it would be selfish to have a show all to himself. He also feels that not everyone would be as enthralled by religious art as he is. So he invites secular scissor artists from all over the world including his personal hero, Walter Von Gunten, to join in his "one-man" shows. Paulos coordinates most of them himself in his "spare time."

Paulos sighs and smiles coyly. "I go to work to relax," he says.