It keeps me occupied and going. My mind seems to be constantly evolving: some kind of making or processing or doing. A lot of hands-on. BD: But art? There are a lot of things you can do without making art. When did art hit you? TB: I was taking a late art history course as a sophomore in college. BD: What were you majoring in? TB: Philosophy, then I switched to English, then history. BD: You were a philosopher? TB: Yes, and a pole-vaulter. BD: Obviously, athletics have played a big part in your life. TB: They always have. They're one of the big reasons I even went to college. BD: So you took an art history class. TB: My ceramics professor recommended it. The ceramics course was a beginner class at the end of freshman year, an elective that a buddy of mine was taking. It had nothing to do with making art, really. It was fun and I did my work-study the next summer in the clay department and started learning more. That particular teacher, Isabel Levitt, got me going. She was a great influence, an Alfred University grad.  BD: Had you ever thought you had an art bone in your body? TB: No, not at all. It was her pushing that made art make sense to me. I decided, after taking the class she had recommended, that it made total sense. From then on, I just realized that art-making, art-producing wasn't just about being able to draw.  BD: That must have been a real inspiration, a "Eureka!" no? TB: It was. I was at the point where I was doing a few more pots and liking it. So I took art history and a few more courses as a junior—drawing, photography, printmaking—and it just fit my mind. I continued with ceramics and I was very excited about printmaking and photography. I was combining photo and etching, with some drawing as well. I was learning the nature of spontaneity that comes when you make pots. It also applies when you make other things. BD: And the spontaneity is what attracted you? TB: Well, that's part of my nature. It's also part of my nature to be involved in many things. It all sort of worked. BD: Are you driven? TB: Oh, I'm very driven. I can't stop thinking about it or planning the next 25,000 things to do, or saving up to do something. I've been driven by it since I made the commitment to make art. That's what I mean by it "fitting." BD: And why did you go to grad school? TB: I went because my undergraduate professors in art history, ceramics, and prints were all very much behind me and said it would be very good to continue to get some perspective on other things. I didn't realize that others were going to grad school to teach; I wasn't, per se. I was strictly doing it to be exposed in a concentrated effort to other people's ideas. BD: Why did you go to Syracuse for graduate school? TB: I looked at a few schools. UCLA and UC Davis, because of their ceramics reputations. I had thought about Alfred, but I wanted to focus on printmaking. So I went to Syracuse.  After graduate school, in 1980, I knew that I wanted to come back to Cleveland because I had a lot of equipment already. I didn't want to go to New York and not have a studio to move into and work in. I knew what it took to do ceramics. I came back and I started in the basement of the building I was living in; that's where the paper studio was. I had a storefront for a gallery. My clay was in the basement and the kiln was inside the studio. BD: So then what happened? Suddenly you go from clay to paper. TB: That happened in grad school. I was double-majoring in printmaking and ceramics. Don Cortese, the print teacher, turned me on to paper. He said, "Why don't you come over?" They were making paper in a 1½ lb. Valley beater. BD: Who were "they"? TB: A few people in the print department. I had no idea what papermaking was. They were making it to print on, primarily. They had a small letterpress, as well. It was very interesting. BD: What were they using, just cotton? TB: Yes, mostly cotton, some linen. We were doing it the old-fashioned way, building our own equipment, like simple squeeze presses. Then a few of us got together and made three hydraulic presses, so we each had one. The next year Don wasn't teaching a class and he asked me if I wanted to use the studio, so I did. It was a little room in the School of Forestry, with a press, a beater, and a small work area. I ended up making large, flat, couched sheets. Then I started playing around with pushing pulp into forms, clay or plaster. At the time there weren't a lot of books about papermaking, at least that I was aware of. Tim Barrett had come to Syracuse, to do a little demonstration of Japanese papermaking. BD: Did you find a lot of differences? TB: Oh yes. He did all of these wonderful things. All the processes. It's part of the nature of why I keep doing this, I guess. BD: You like processes. TB: I do. It gives you such a variety of tools to work with, to express yourself. It's probably the craft side of me. BD: Tell me, do you find some similarities between clay and paper?  TB: There are a lot of similarities, in terms of their states: they go from soft material to hard material. Clay is relatively soft and plastic. Paper is relatively plastic, although not quite the same, and it also goes to a hard state and becomes something stronger, like clay.  BD: How much time do you spend working with clay versus paper?  TB: Probably a third of the time. BD: And which do you find more satisfying? Or are they equal children? TB: They're equal. I go back and forth all the time. Like throwing a pot, I work with paper much more spontaneously than probably a lot of papermakers do. BD: I know there are people in the design field who have to draw the whole thing out. TB: Oh sure, but I found out a long time ago that extemporaneous works better for me, as a rule. I think about how a series will go and I know how to develop an idea, but I often discover a new idea by going through another idea. The more you do it, the more you have the techniques. You need them for getting things right, but you have to go beyond the techniques. Just because you have a fancy piece of paper and great color, you still may not get to your ultimate idea. Anybody can master techniques and make something look okay. To bring art to it is to bring something else from somewhere inside you. BD: Your soul? TB: Yes. It has to look like maybe you didn't have anything to do with it. It's something that people can relate to on a lot of different levels, that you also relate to. Your audience completes the process, they finalize what you've done. You're stopping the process at that point to say "This is a piece," and then the process goes on. It's cyclic and roundabout rather than a thematic way of working. Obviously there are times when you want to make specific things, you have to resolve how you're going to do them, technically. But in terms of the processes, I allow work to develop as it happens. BD: Or you let it happen. TB: I start to let it happen and then I find it, control it. You end up controlling a lot more, controlling the spontaneity. That's the nature of technique and that's why I think so many people get consumed by technique.  BD: Early on, you weren't using vacuum tables or piling up the pulp like you do. TB: No, that developed over the course of time. I was doing plaster casting. I would put the pulp in the plaster, hand press it, fan dry it, then pull it off the mold. Then I started using materials, like ceramics, and a lot of other things: plastics, very simple shapes, nothing special. I started drawing with materials, laying them on a marble table. Then I started thinking about making a vacuum table. I had a tiny little vacuum pump for a while, then I built a more sophisticated system. BD: And when was this happening? TB: In the early eighties. BD: So, you've been casting paper for twenty years. Who else does this kind of work? TB: I know that Frank Gallo was casting. BD: But your work is much more abstract. Do you use any imagery? TB: Sometimes, certainly. Realistic things: text, elements that are very recognizable. A lot of times I combine shapes. BD: What I mean is using printed paper or things like Xerox transfer onto your cast paper. TB: I've done dry point and etchings, like drawings, and inked then cast at the same time. BD: How did you do that? TB: The image is the first thing down on your cast. When I think of drawing, I think of drawing with materials in a form. Laying down the materials, looking at the form, thinking about it, how it's going to work in reverse. A lot of the things I've made in clay are negatives made as a mold for positives. Also, it's a matter of working like a printmaker. I put a lot of textured materials down on a table and think how a printmaker would think, in terms of mirror images, especially when there are letters and language. I lay things out that will release from the paper. That's where I do my drawing. I make up a lot of elements out of clay. Then I lay the paper on top of that. A lot of times it's colored. BD: So you don't overlay sheets, you're putting down handfuls of pulp. TB: Yes. I'll have thirty to forty five-gallon pails of pulp going. Variations in color. The whole spectrum. BD: How many pounds of pulp go into a painting? TB: In some of the large ones maybe ten or twenty pounds. BD: Do you work with linters? TB: I use cotton half-stuff for the castings, beaten for an hour or two. I use two grades of it. One is a bright white, the other is more blue, but all processed by Cheney. BD: Have you ever used rags? TB: Yes, I used to, quite a bit. That's how I started.  BD: What's this obsession with color you have? You seem to use a lot of really bright colors. TB: I don't see it as an obsession. I love color, but I don't always use it. I've done series of monochromatic work, too. I just use color as it comes. BD: Do you mix your colors knowing where they're going? TB: Some of them I keep stocks of, like yellows and blues. If I mix up twenty or thirty colors when I'm doing a body of work, I'll end up using a hundred and fifty colors, mixing them like paints. The pails are, a lot of times, high intensities. BD: They're like tubes of pure color. TB: Right, that's how I use them. Sometimes I've painted a series of works. I've gone in and painted acrylic on top of the pulp painting. I don't have any problem going back and forth. I find it more freeing to color as I sculpt the piece than to color it later, but I've done series of white-on-white and then gone back in to add color.  BD: What do you use to color your pulp? TB: Primarily I use pigments from Twinrocker or Carriage House.  BD: Pigments as opposed to dyes. Why? TB: Well, they're more colorfast and a little more opaque. BD: You don't do only cast pieces, do you? TB: No, I do a lot of flat works and book papers. I've been doing that all along in a series of works that are either stenciled or combinations of stencils, overlays, and veils of colored pulp. BD: Like pulp painting. TB: Pulp painting has a bad rap at this point. BD: But you flow colors. TB: Yes, I flow colors together or I use very finely beaten colored pulp to paint with, or watery pulps to make a section transparent or to make a shape or an image. I've probably made thirty series of flat works, each with maybe twenty to fifty pieces. The pieces in a series are on a variety of scales, but all the same image-wise, like landscapes or images of pots. BD: So, those are pictorial. TB: They're a little more pictorial, but they have an abstract nature to them. My drawings are not what I would call photo-realistic. Hopefully they're more fluid. BD: What's the largest piece you've made? TB: The largest piece I've made of a single cast is about five feet by nine or ten feet. I've also done some combinations; larger pieces that are connected through shapes. BD: So you have vacuum tables that large? TB: Yes, I have a table that's six feet by six feet, and one that's about five and a half by ten and a half or eleven. BD: Where do you get the boxes for the vacuum tables? TB: I have them made. They're acrylic boxes meant for framing that have been cracked, broken, or scratched. They get that way from being shipped back and forth. I can't use them for framing anymore so I've made vacuum tables out of them. I have ten or fifteen here. BD: Ten or fifteen tables at once? So then you can work on different pieces at the same time.  TB: As a general rule I will put the drawings or elements down for two to five pieces, look at them, go back and forth. I call it "setting them up." I like to work on more than one thing at a time. If I'm stuck with one, I can go to another and work on it. I'll have five made up for a series, then I'll do all the pulping and lay the pulp on the tables. BD: How long does that take you, once the concept is there until the finished product?  TB: It's generally a couple of days in terms of laying the color in. For the casting, drying, and pulling off the molds, it's generally from a day and a half to three or four days. The laying down the forms takes more time. Sometimes I'll have a few elements I want to start with and then I connect them and look at them and play with them. They'll sometimes go in a few hours, but sometimes they don't. They sit there. I'm looking at them, thinking about them, then going back to something else. BD: You must have a warehouse full of salvaged material, with repeat shapes. TB: Yes, I have a few thousand items to cast from. I probably have hundreds of elements, in stone, plastic, bisque clay, tile. All kinds of odd textural things. I make quite a few of the clay ones, or I trim, cut, and shape pieces of stone. A lot of it is found objects. BD: So, you're always on the lookout. TB: Always. You tend to use your favorite things. You know how you're going to change the field or the nature of the ground against an image, or the nature of a texture running into another texture. They all become part of your language. BD: How big is your studio? TB: Oh, about 2,500 square feet. BD: And you have two beaters. What kind? TB: A Howie Clark, fiberglass, and a David Reina. BD: I notice that your work is becoming more pictorial, more realistic.  TB: Yes, there are a few more organic elements there. BD: Is that a new avenue for you? TB: It has been in the last two or three years. It's an interesting growth, much more recognizable than my work in the past, but they're still done in the context of process and form. BD: So you won't be a della Robbia of the cast paper field. TB: I doubt it. I've done it in clay, but I actually find it restricting when I get into making a specific image. Say a piece is strictly a flower. It starts to become too ordinary for me. I'm not alive with it. This is odd, I feel more alive with a couple of shapes coming together. So, when I add these organic elements I like them as odd additions to an abstraction. A lot of elements read as real things and they are from real things. It's a language that isn't just visual. People connect to things. You've seen that texture; it reads right away like something. Slate reads like slate. You're doing a realistic drawing, in a sense. It's discernible as slate or a rock. BD: Why do you think people make paper by hand when they can go out and just buy it? TB: I think it's the process that they enjoy. It's a very seductive medium. That's part of the reason so many people do it.