The Paperartzi are first and foremost the original invention and creation of Ray Besserdin, multi international award winning Paper Sculpture Artist www.papersculptureartist.com
They grew naturally from Ray’s childhood love of making all sorts of things from paper, cartooning and caricaturing, (amongst many other interests as you can discover).
Through high school, he was one of the regular school magazine cartoonists and even experimented with stop motion animation. His sense of humour comes from seeing fun and games in patterns, relationships or contrasts in images and words. “I especially love double meanings. It plays out in my humour as much as in my serious artworks where objects can be seen in multiple ways all at once. There’s fun and stimulus in that sort of trickery”.
In their original form, the Paperartzi first sprung to mind early one morning in 1995. “It just made sense that the world of paper, and all the things made of this amazing material we take for granted, should come alive. What a load of fun if I made parallels, visual metaphors and contrasts with daily life, all played out in paper objects and materials, in a paper world constructed in my paper sculpture!”
“The first characters I thought of, my heroes, were just torn scraps of paper with a face, a tuft of hair, floating hands and feet. I called them Rip-Torns. One of them stars on the Paperartzi logo trademark today”.
Every object of paper we know of is fair game as one of the Paperartzi. Even a toilet roll can relate wisdom as you wouldn’t have thought possible. If you metaphorically were about to have your face wiped on someone’s “origin of sunshine”, what could be the most positive moral you could draw from that situation? Paper objects suddenly become a vehicle to laugh and learn about ourselves in a way that’s fresh, fun and inspiring.
As the Paper + Art name implies, even though some caricatures like Santa Claus don’t originate from a paper world, every artwork in the Paperartzi brand is made in paper sculpture and therefore has a style and life uniquely intrinsic to Ray’s ideas and techniques.
Above all, they’re just Rippin good Fun!
