A brief personal history

 

 

DURING PAUL’S FORMATIVE YEARS in St. Paul, Minnesota, he often found himself in his father’s plant pathology lab. While young Paul found science intriguing, he wondered how long he’d be washing test tubes and inoculating bean seedlings with fungal spores.

A little later, when Paul took a break from art school to visit his family’s cabin in the woods, he had a breakthrough. Picking a simple fern leaf, he stared at it long and hard. Naturally, he began to draw it. It was surprisingly difficult. But Paul was blown away by its complex geometry and profound beauty.

Ever since then, Paul has been devoted to rendering the intricacies of the natural and human world, finding in his subjects both scientific interest and aesthetic appeal. Today, he’s lost count of the number of children’s picture books and pop-ups he’s completed since starting his own illustration and design business in 1990. His illustrations and designs have also appeared in numerous adult books, exhibits, magazines, and advertisements of all kinds, as well as on products and product labels. Whether he’s painting a rare desert cactus or a scrumptious-looking candy bar, his work is always accurate, well researched, and realistic—and it has lots of personality, too.

Although Paul has a lifetime of experience with old-school drafting and drawing methods, by now he’s abandoned his railroad pen in favor of Bezier curves, and the old waxer machine for the type tool. If you can’t tell whether the paintbrush he used was digital or sable hair, he figures his work is successful. These days, a classically trained and computer-savvy artist is pretty hard to find.

Paul lives in Tucson with his wife, Stina, two artist daughters, Anna and Claire, and baby Leo, surrounded by the Sonoran Desert—which inspires his art and spawns his dreams. He is artist-in-residence at the UA’s Tumamoc Hill, a desert research preserve and historical landmark.  Besides working as an illustrator, he exhibits his photography, drawings, and prints.

He still has that fern drawing stashed away somewhere. (It’s not for sale.)

 —Anna Mirocha