Paula Kunst

As a kid growing up in Louisville, KY, I began copying cartoons and festooning my walls with them, and more than once, got gigged in school for drawing and doodling. However, I never took art seriously or even thought I could make anything pleasing to anyone else. I simply enjoyed doing it.

Other than an odd art class here and there, I have never had any formal training in art, but over the years I experimented with different mediums for varying periods of time and always got tremendous enjoyment from my efforts. In the late 1960s and 70s I began wood carving while living for a year in Kansas (what else is there to do in Kansas), and I did relief animals for my kids' rooms, as well as 3-D carvings. In the early 1970s in Arizona I played around with batik learned from a friend, macramé learned from a book, and later, took a Navaho weaving class, after moving to Southern California. I also did a little painting here and there. (They are probably still trying to remove murals from one house!) This year I have learned about and made some altered books. In fact, altering what already exists is a lot of what I do. Besides the books, I have been altering small furniture, wooden birds and animals, even an old guitar. I love color and lots of it and often use it "where no color has gone before."

The next twenty odd years were consumed with raising two kids and a career as a school psychologist and private therapist and little else. In the 1990's the art bug bit me again and I started "makin' stuff," painting anything that didn't move, and making jewelry, mostly pins, out of buttons, and soon after, out of old costume jewelry. I knew then what I wanted to do when I retired, and because I had visited Florence many times, I knew where I wanted to do it. I bought a house here in 2002 and moved up in 2003, and am now having the time of my life.