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By Ted McIrvine, Hendersonville Times-News, Arts Spectrum
September 28, 2008
Monahan Creates a Fun Atmosphere
Leo Monahan, America’s foremost paper sculpture illustrator, has
lived among us for several years now. The Silver Fox Gallery
represents him in Hendersonville. He lives in Barnardsville, enjoying a
stunning view across a cove toward a rising forest of mixed hardwood
and evergreen trees. Among the many greens on the slope are
touches of gray-brown: Two very old, very tall, very dead trees to whom
Monahan speaks from time to time. “They have gone to a place where I
will eventually go,” he says, adding that perhaps the trees know some
things that he does not.
It is not a large jump from admiring dead trees to creating a series of
paper sculptures with the title “Autumn Leaves and Butterfly Bones.”
He likes to explain, with a straight face, that the spidery forms left by
decaying butterflies and other insects are their skeletons. Thus fall is a
time of finding “butterfly bones” among the fallen leaves. This is an
ongoing project, creating works that combine paper leaves with
delicate and intricate insect outlines. The series’ whimsical title is
characteristic of this artist.
Monahan was born in Lead, S.D., and would likely have followed his
father and grandfather into the mines, had he not served in the Korean
War and then used his GI Bill educational benefits to study art at the
Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles County (now the California
Institute of the Arts in Valencia). Walt Disney’s estate was the college’s
largest benefactor, and Monahan became involved in various Disney
enterprises. Over nearly 50 years, he taught color to Disney employees
and was an independent contractor for Disney amusement parks. In
his latter years contracting for Disney, he was creating paper
sculptures that were then measured, digitized and through computer-
aided design became large-scale metal figures that you may have
seen at Disney parks.
Monahan’s studio and storerooms take up most of the lower level of
his house in Barnardsville. There are many bookshelves, some
obscured by pegboard hanging completed and framed paper
sculptures. Cabinets clutter the ancillary storerooms, filled with found
objects and with pieces of folded, torn and painted two- and three-ply
Bristol paper that will be incorporated into future sculptures. Also on
file are hundreds of his poems, including many haikus. Alongside the
studio there is a small office for his wife, Karen Martin. But as she is a
life member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and spends
much of her time commuting between Los Angeles and Stuttgart, her
husband has even appropriated some of that room as storage space.
Among the framed pieces of finished work are some that remain as
mementos of past projects in California. For lobby art during a Ventura
production of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” Monahan created
sculptures representing characters associated with Godot. (You will
recall that Estragon and Vladimir, who await the arrival of Godot, don’t
really know much about him. Monahan created a mythical back-story.)
Beginning Friday, Nov. 14, in Asheville Community Theatre’s spacious
lobby, Monahan’s paper sculptures will be on display in a series
showing ordinary people with lumpy figures dancing. They dance to
hide grief or loneliness. They dance to express joy. But they dance. It
will be an appropriate accompaniment to Asheville Community
Theatre’s production of “NunCrackers,” a Nunsense Christmas
musical. As Leo Monahan says, “If it is not either fun or funny, I am not
interested in it.”
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