Lee Stephanie - Plaster Studio: Mixed-Media Techniques for Painting, Casting and Carving

You have a powder and you add water. But oh, the variety of projects that can emerge from such simple materials! Plaster teaches us something new each time we explore it, and so the gift of discovery is around every turn. Surely we all have somewhere a lump of plaster into which a young child has pressed her hand. A moment in time, a gift for mom, a beaming and proud young artist. Houses that many of us have lived in are or were made of stucco, another plaster-and-cement product, troweled over a supporting layer of chicken wire. Again, material so elemental that most of us could easily imagine the steps necessary to construct this shelter.

If you were to stop us on the street and ask what it is about using plaster in our artwork that is so satisfying to our creative urges, youd be wise to have a comfy chair handy because the list of reasons is not a short one. Its not a linear list either. Its a circular list. It loops around and across and back up and around itself again as we begin to explain how plaster responds to paint, how well it marries to other surfaces and back again to how, when painted, it marries to itself. The layers of possibility are stacked one upon another when you slice through the strata of our idea-incubating minds. We might even start to get a bit animated when we move into telling you about the possibilities of three-dimensional form.

Well nod our heads emphatically at what the other is saying and resist the urge to let the ideas being sparked in that very moment of conversation take over our minds and bodies and pull us to the studio to make it happennow. The love affair is that great, that inspiring, that pure. How else is a medium more serving than if it awakens a youthful excitement to the approach of creative play? Plaster is one of the most versatile and adaptable mediums we know. Like other art mediumspaint, pastels, clayits origin is the earth but unlike many other art mediums, it is almost in the same form as it was found. Here we are using a material so raw and cooperative and willing to be altered, we cant help but feel a return to simplicity. Its a return to art that is more about expression and less about trend.