Artist Profile: Paul Anderson

Paul Anderson

8216 W. 113th Ter
Overland Park, KS 66210

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Bio:

I am the Director of Creative Production at MoonRiver Pottery and Ceramics. For more information about this group, see moonriverpottery.com. I have always built stuff, made things with my hands. Didn’t always think of it as art, but I did think of it as a process which brought things into existence that didn’t exist before. I am fond of using my creative self and that part of my existence. As a 12 year old missionary kid in West Africa, I built many things. I scavenged shipping crates and made stools and rudimentary tables and they sold! I arranged bird beaks, monkey skulls, feathers, sticks and even scorpions in bulletin board arrays in my room. I was delighted and laughed at the fun of composing those collages. Perhaps because in Africa I couldn’t run down to the local hardware or toy store to buy new things I may have wanted or needed, I developed a scavenger’s eye. Things tossed aside, lost or forgotten, have always had for me a second or additional purpose. All I had to do was be creative and invent the next life for the “lost and toss aside.” So it went, my hands putting things together and in 1990 I began making rustic furniture out of aspen trees.  The United States Forestry Service classifies aspen as a weed, generally used in the Southwest only for fencing. However, I saw that the contorted, twists and turns that aspen puts itself through as it grows creates character which I wanted to bring into my one of a kind wood products, and they sold! In 2012, my wife introduced me to clay. I studied throwing with Brian Klapmeyer at the Kansas City Clay Guild. Ceramics became another medium to be formed and joined with wood, lost and found pieces of metal and other items, all adrift in overlooked places. As with driftwood, objects that float about on expansive seas of asphalt or salt water or junk piles, develop character and that endears them to me. When I make a piece that conjoins different mediums, all I’m trying to say is, “Look at this. Look what you may not have seen that could be called ‘beauty’.” Ironically, that same form of creative thinking has helped me be a successful licensed PhD Psychologist in private practice in Kansas City Metro for 30+ years.