How long have you been doing art?

In general, in the current application, just one year. Previous to that, I’ve been a musician my entire life. From an artistic perspective, music has been a part of my life for a long time. A number of years ago, I did some work in copper sculpture, and some work in pastels. I never really pursued it like I have in the past year.

Could you tell me more about the copper sculptures? There’s an artist who’s very close to The Buttonwood who was doing brass sculptures, so I’d love to hear more about that. 

Sure! At the time I was living in North Carolina, I had a very large workshop out back with ambles and hammers and such. I’ve always liked working with hand tools and power tools. And I was doing some work on my house and came across a big piece of copper [sheathing] that we weren’t using anymore. I sort of saw something in there, so I started banging it out. I started making, as my wife called them, Dingle Dangles –  large, hanging sculptures out of hammered copper. I would put snap swivels on them, and they would turn gently in the wind. I used to do a whole bunch of that stuff. It was really quite relaxing and a lot of fun.

Now this ability to see things: you see things in other things that people might think are…junk. Could you tell me more about that? Is that a thing that nags at you, or is that something that helps you?

With the copper, the first piece I worked on was really a piece of scrap copper. So, I went to the local recycling center, a big industrial kind of place, with my truck, and I would load up big boxes of scrap copper, all kinds of pieces of copper, and I could just look at them, and they would speak to me in some way. “Okay, I kind of see these things.” So it never really nagged at me. It’s just things that kind of unfold naturally or organically, right there. 

Well, the reason I put it that way, I guess, is, are you the type of artist who, when you get an idea, are you able to sit on it, or do you have to work obsessively until you finish?

I let things kind of percolate or ruminate for a while, but ideas come to me all the time, especially late at night or early in the morning as I’m waking up. I get these ideas so I keep them fresh in my head. Many times I will jot down ideas I have. I keep a notebook nearby, and I sketch things out as I see them in my head. Then I’ll go out to my shed and start working on them. But to be obsessive to finish a piece, no, I let the piece tell me when it’s done. I look at it. Look at it many times. I will work for a couple of hours on something, and I’ll just put it away, and I’ll go back the next day, or sometimes I might be working out my backyard, mowing the lawn or something, and say, oh, okay, and I run in. I got this idea I’d run in, but look at the piece that’s up on the easel and start adding something to it. And that may only take me 10 or 15 minutes, and I’ll leave it and come back another time. 

So the piece calls for your attention, and then once it’s satisfied, you can go do your thing, and then it’ll call you back when it wants attention. 

And many times, yeah, I’ll sit and I’ll sit in my shed, and I’ll just, I’ll just kind of meditate on the piece for a while and until it tells me it’s done. A lot of times [it asks], “Are we really done here?” Yeah, I’m not sure I know it’s not done, but then I’ll reach a point where I know it’s complete. 

I want to talk about this installment, particularly the one that we’re going to be putting up at The Buttonwood Tree in December. Can you tell me what medium primarily, and maybe what inspiration you had behind this set of paintings, or if each painting is an individual thing, or if this was kind of a set for you?

I think it’s a unique medium. I use domestic paper towels. I buy them at Sam’s. They have an interesting oval pattern pressed into them. What I do is I take wax paper and iron, and I apply wax paper with the hot iron to the paper towels front and back. Then, I spray them with clear acrylic, so now those paper towels actually have some substance to them. Most times, I will also apply a fine powder called gypsum powder. It’s kind of like the stuff that sheet rock is made out of, but it comes in a powder form, and I will spread that over and spray it with water, and let it dry. Now, I have a relatively robust medium to work on, but it’s still flexible and pliable. So I can actually kind of move it. So that’s the medium that I work with. 

I also work on aluminum foil as well. Everything I apply to the paper towels or aluminum foil is acrylics. Many times I will use spray can acrylics. I have a particular brand that I like, which is called Krylon, and I’ll use that. Typically, I have a general idea of what I want to do when I start. Sometimes it’s small. It’s only one sheet of paper towels. Sometimes I will use painters’ masking tape, and I’ll take together six, eight or ten paper towels to make a much bigger surface, but I have a general idea of what I want to do, and I’ll start with that, and it slowly unfolds. 

The theme for what we’re doing at Buttonwood Tree for December is called “Space to the Seventh Power”. A lot of what I do is outer space kind of stuff. And you’ve seen some of the pictures that I’ve sent you of my work. And they just kind of evolve. So I come up with an idea and again, the painting evolves over a period of time, and many times the finished product is nowhere near what I originally had in mind. I let it speak to me, and I let it evolve and the more I do it, the more I work on the piece, the more I see things in the piece that aren’t there yet, that I want to put there. So that’s how it unfolds. It goes from very small pieces. They might be seven or eight inches by eleven or twelve inches up, to two-and-a-half or three feet by two and a half or three feet, or sometimes even a little bit bigger.

So let me just see if I understand this, you have a canvas or a board, and you don’t paint with the paper towel, but you apply the paper towel to the canvas…?

I use no canvas. I paint on the paper towel. 

What are you posting the paper towel to?

So here’s my easel: I have a six foot aluminum step ladder, which I bolted on a very large piece of plywood. And on top of that plywood, many times I will use Styrofoam, and I use clamps to clip the Styrofoam on there.

Then, I will tape the paper towel to that to hold it up. This way, I can easily remove it. I can take that paper towel off. Sometimes I’ll put it on a workbench. I’ll work on a horizontal surface rather than a vertical surface, depending on what I’m doing. So, yeah, it’s directly applied to the paper towel. And some of the challenges I’ve come up with now is that the paper towels are actually kind of delicate. I can’t stretch them, or I can’t frame them. So what I’ve been doing I’ve been taking the finished work, and I’ve been taking photographs of them, and I go to my local print shop here in Newington, and I have them printed out on fifteen-mil, pristine canvas, and then I can have them stretch so they come out really nice.

So the works we’re gonna see at The Buttonwood are those prints in frames?

You’re gonna see both. You’re gonna see some originals that are on paper towels. As my techniques have evolved, I’ve been doing some work where I am actually affixing the paper towels to a Styrofoam board, and I’m directly pinning on that, and then I can have that board backed and framed. You will see some of the originals that are on the paper towels, but most of them [are not], because they’re just too delicate to stretch. 

December 8th, from 1 to 4 PM you’ll be having an art reception at The Buttonwood Tree. Is there anything we should know about this event that the public should know? Did you say you had music? 

Yeah, along with all my pieces of work. Actually, I’m getting some advice from the director of the Art League of New Britain on which pieces to present, because my pieces have evolved. I have four or five different kinds of evolutions. So I want to take the best of each of those evolutions and present them. But along with that, I’m also presenting about a half a dozen original songs that I wrote during the 2020 COVID lockdown in the spring of 2020 and it’s a humorous theme. I did a lot of binge watching on TV during that time because there’s no place to go and really nothing to do. I’m going to present songs that I wrote during that spring of 2020 COVID lockdown. It should be fun. I’m going to have two friends of mine that I’ve been playing music with for quite a while. I’m teaching them my original songs, and we’re going to present those. We’ll probably do maybe a 30 minute set, something like that.

Is there anything else you want us to know about you? 

Yeah, this “Space to the Seventh Power”, all got started because I had to have carpal tunnel surgery on my right wrist and my right elbow a year ago. It precluded me from playing my bass guitar because I had very limited mobility. So in the meantime, I was working out in my shed, making a big, giant wind mobile for a tree in my backyard. I was using paper towels for masking. Of these metal pieces that I was spray painting, I saw some patterns in the paper towels. It looked really pretty cool. So I started playing with those, and I secretly took them to my print shop and had one of those pieces printed on a piece of canvas. And I said, “I think I’m going to show this to my wife.” And if she says, “It’s really stupid”, I’ll just hang it in the shed and I’ll be done with it. So I walked home with the stretched piece on Canvas, and she looked at it and said, “Oh, did you go to an art store?” I said, “No, I want to hang this up…this is from my workshop.” That kind of inspired me to working on paper towels and using spray acrylics and things like that. That’s kind of how it all got started, “Space to the Seventh Power,” sure. 

So your wife, her approval, would you say that helped? You kind of be like, “Wow, this is actually something I should do more of.” 

Oh, without a doubt, if she didn’t tell me, “It looks like I went to an art store. Did I buy that in an art store?”, I would have just dismissed it, and I would have hung the piece in the shed and said, that was a fun project. And I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. It was very serendipitous, and all of a sudden, all this stuff started coming out of me. I would go to the shed two or three hours a day, and I don’t know where it was coming from, but I just let it flow. 

Yeah, we try not to think about it too much.

Exactly, yeah. Exactly, right, yeah. 

Paul Bongiovanni will be presenting his art installation titled, “Space to the Seventh Power” for the month of December at The Buttonwood Tree. An art reception will be held on Sunday, December 8th from 1 to 4 PM. Find more information at buttonwood.org/art.