Studio Tour: Paper Artist Paulina Johnson Shares her Space, Technique and Favorite Color Scheme
Paper artist Paulina Johnson prefers neutrals but her second floor studio is bright, airy and inviting. Her paper projects from the past seven years line the walls and her current test sheet for an upcoming commission is laid out on a table in the middle of the room. She leans over, demonstrating how she squeezes out a thin line of glue onto the orange base layer paper before securing a strip of paper on its side and gently wiping away the excess glue. Her rows of paper strips create wavy lines on the paper, depicting mountains (the commission guideline was mountains in the fall) but for the neutral-loving artist, the oranges and yellows are just too bright. She shrugs, wiping away more glue. “I think I’m going to have to stick with my neutrals,” she says.
It’s always an experiment – that’s what led her to where she is now. With an extensive background in graphic design, she decided to go to graduate school, earning an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2017. There, she discovered the discipline of paper. “There’s something to it,” she says. “The tactile aspect to it, I think is really cool. But it’s so humble too. It’s so natural. It’s easy to recycle and reuse. It can be very fragile but also super strong. I think it’s so versatile.”
Her first piece took shape when her professor asked her to make a list about all the things that she loved and all the things that she hated about graphic design. “My number one hate was the amount of waste it creates,” Paulina says. She collected her junk mail for a week, shredded it and gave it new life in the form of paper quilling, a technique in which strips of paper are rolled, twisted, curled and then are glued together into different shapes.
These days, Paulina works with thin strips of paper cardstock creating 3D scenes of nature: mountains, lakes, rivers. “It’s time consuming and tedious,” she says of the work, “but I lose myself in it. It’s meditative for me.” The dimensionality of her work surprised her at first – “how it moves with you as you move,” she says, but now she is guided by her surprise and questions. “With every piece I make, I have questions. What if there’s more contrast between the background and the strips of paper? What if there’s less? The questions that come up help me decide what to make next. I know how to say mountain in paper but how do I say tree?”
Paulina’s studio, located upstairs at 1120 S. Lincoln Avenue, will be open for visitors on Saturday, August 3 as part of the open studio tours taking place during All Arts Week. For more information on All Arts Week, visit www.undiscoveredearth.com. Follow Paulina on her website, www.paulinamjohnson.com or on Instagram @paulinamjohnson.