Each keystroke is carefully placed

There’s not a lot of information about Paul’s early life other than he was born with Cerebral Palsy, his family moved from Philadelphia to Hollywood, Florida, near trains and train tracks – common subjects of his earlier art creations.

Paul developed an interest in creating typewriter art when he was 11-years-old and had started toying with a typewriter his neighbor had discarded. His creations became an outlet for a child that turned to new ways to express himself since being non-verbal he could not easily convey his feelings to others. Because he could not easily grip artist’s tools such as pencils, pens, markers, pastels or paint brushes, he turned to the typewriter.

The subjects of Paul’s art were publicly recognizable. He enjoyed creating pictures of animals, still lifes, nature, war scenes, spiritual symbols, and outdoor scenes. His works included his childhood fascination with trains; his affinity towards a squirrel he befriended; spiritual leaders such as the Pope, Jesus and Mother Theresa; war scenes and country heroes. He also created pictures of well-known art he admired, including Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa,” Auguste Rodin’s “The Thinker,” and Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s “Washington Crossing the Delaware.”

It’s not so much the subject that is remarkable about Paul’s work, it’s the painstaking skill of using symbols on a typewriter to form perfect replicas of existing work, and innovative representations of his surroundings.

Paul’s images, perhaps surprisingly, were created using only a handful of symbol keys – !, @, #, %, ^, _, (, &, ) – which were accessible along the top row of his typewriter keyboard. Remarkable, when a person considers that manual typewriters required the ribbons to be positioned, the roller to be adjusted, and the paper to be secured. Typewriters, of that era, left no room for error since erasing mistaken keystrokes was not a clean option.

His work is NEXT…