Biography from American Design Ltd.:
|  Paul Waldum developed an appreciation for nature as a young boy, hiking
and climbing the mountains near Livingston, Montana. The memories
of those expeditions, he recalls, left lasting sketches on his mind.
"Nature's elements," he describes, "are driving forces in producing my
artwork."
Waldum became a photographer when he was 16.
After earning his Bachelor of Arts degree from Montana State
University, he toured colleges and universities around the country
showing a multi-image slide show, "Creations of a Wilderness," that
reflected his travels through the mountains of Montana. "We can
often look at the grandeur of a mountain peak," he exclaims, "but fail
to see its elements -- a drop of water, a blade of grass, a grain of
sand, dusk, dawn, the seasons, a mountain top. These elements are all
building blocks, creating the uniqueness of a landscape."
Since then, Waldum's photography has appeared in Outside Magazine, the Minnesota Science Museum, Yellowstone National Park, and the Northern Plains Indian Museum.
Today,
however, Waldum spends most of his time working on serigraphs of
landscapes that convey his love of nature. When creating a
serigraph, Waldum starts with sketches he has drawn of a landscape or
drawings that he has abstracted from photographs. "I then paint a color
sketch with acrylic paint to determine the print's colors, light,
atmospheric conditions, time of day, and the mood I want to capture in
the print," he says.
Waldum runs 15-30 silkscreen impressions
for every print he creates, each time printing a different color.
"My first color is the sky," he explains, "I use two to four colors of
ink, blended together to resemble an atmospheric condition in nature. I
run each sheet of paper under the screen and print only the area that I
have not blocked out with glue. Before printing the second color,
I block out a different area of the screen, reducing the area being
printed, and print over parts of the previous color. This is known as
'reduction printing.' "
Currently, Waldum is teaching elementary
school art classes in the West, and he has shown his students' work at
the Children's Creative Art Centre and Gallery in Torun, Poland.
"Art is unique," he states, "because it gives a student the opportunity
for self-expression, self-interpretation, and a sense of
achievement." When he is not teaching, Waldum is either producing
his own art or gathering new ideas while traveling or hiking in the
mountains.
"Creating a serigraph," he defines, "is capturing a
moment on paper. I gather memories from innumerable experiences
and draw my composition, simplifying nature's lines and contours into
shapes that are printed with different values and tones of color to
create the illusion of space and depth. It's exciting for me to
think that I can capture moments of nature as an art piece."
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