Meet the Master of Monster Mache

It’s Looking as if they’ve just plodded off the set of a classic monster movie, the creatures in Gene Fenton’s menagerie are colorful, fantastic - and intentionally a little disturbing. They bring together a medium and a subject that most of us may never have uttered in the same breath before: paper maché and dinosaurs.

Fenton, graduated from IUP in 1993, with a major in Sculpture and a minor in Printmaking. Sculpture, he says, was “a natural choice” for him. He had begun doing modeling clay sculptures back in grade school, and even then, his subject matter came easily: “I made dinosaurs, and painted the clay with car paint.” He got the paint from his father’s company, ICRS, an auto body and repair shop in Indiana, and recalls that he once spilled it all over the floor at home, to his parents’ horror. “Let’s just say…it was not a happy moment in the house,” he notes dryly.

After his undergraduate work, Fenton attended graduate school at Long Island University, where he received his Master’s Degree in Sculpture. He had done paper maché on and off while at IUP, and began making dinosaur-like creatures while living in New York. He moved back home in 1996, taking a “day job” in his father’s auto shop. It was then that he started working seriously in paper maché, which, as he explains, “isn’t always a medium that people necessarily look up to - it’s considered a ‘craft’ rather than ‘art.’” Does the somewhat dubious stature of his chosen medium bother him? Fenton just grins. “Well, it’s a little late now,” he says with complete practicality. But he is fully aware of how odd his work can sound. “When you say ‘paper maché dinosaurs’…do you have a good memory of paper maché in school? I can safely say I don’t. As a kid, you don’t have the patience. It’s messy, and it’s fun for about five minutes. But there’s some discipline behind working in paper maché.”

The reasons he chose the medium are, typically, born of practicality. Just as he used leftover paint from his father’s shop to paint the clay dinosaurs he made in grade school, Fenton, as a working artist, chose paper maché for sculpting because it was free and readily available: “I didn’t have the clay.” He also points out that paper maché can be done anywhere, as it’s not a material for which the artist needs a separate studio. “You can do it in front of the T.V.” His main workshop is the cavernous basement . (It’s amusing to imagine the surprise of anyone who wanders unawares into Fenton’s herd of teeth-baring, eye-bulging creatures - especially if the lights are dim.)

His other inspirations include comic book artist Jack Kirby, creator of classic Marvel comics in the 1960s, which showcased monsters rather than superheroes. “The arms and teeth on my creatures, especially,” he explains, “show the Jack Kirby influence.” Another source for him is the work of Theodore Rosak, an artist who did semi-abstract bronze sculptures in the 1960s. Looking at these various sources as a whole, it’s easy to see how their styles and elements overlap and influence each other.

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