Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Paula Krieg. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Paula, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

After graduating from the School of Visual Arts in 1980, I stayed in New York City and ended up living in a community of artists in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I took classes at the Center for Book Arts and volunteered in the bindery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, both of which helped me to explore creative book arts and to develop the skills I needed to when I began to make a living teaching children the art of book making.

Teaching book arts took a circuitous route. In the mid-90’s I joined my husband in rural upstate New York, where he was restoring a dilapidated (and now fabulous) farmhouse. In New York City I had always managed to make enough money to support myself while I worked on my art at my own pace. But that all changed when our children were born. No more alternative incomes for me; the only way I would allow myself to earn money while raising very young children was by doing creative work. Yes, it was a risk. Far away from the city, long before the Internet entered the picture, I was a newcomer in a community I didn’t know, with no guideposts, much less a guide.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I began with the local library, asking if I could offer arts programming. The librarian said “sure, you could try,” but assured me that no one would show up for what I was proposing.

I was undeterred. I applied for grants, hung flyers, wrote press releases, did free demonstrations, and whoa, kids showed up, in droves. That led to funding by the New York State Council on the Arts, which allowed me to organize at least 16 after-school sessions per year for the next 10 years. Soon, school-connected organizations heard about my work. Before long, I started getting invitations to teach book arts in schools in the Adirondacks and then in the Saratoga Springs area. For 25 years I filled a schedule working with dozens of school districts, meaning my students totaled in the many thousands.

During this time my priority remained to design projects that met my own criteria for creative exploration while still supporting the educational institutions that had invited me in. I nurtured relationships with teachers, collaborating with them on project design, always aligning them with my own artistic interests. The result is a large body of work that delights me.

As fulfilling as the work I was doing in schools was, it was clear that my reach was limited to only the children and their teachers. It felt like I was in a very small bubble. By this time, it was the end of 2009, and I fumbled my way through starting a blog, intending to expand my audience. With limited computer skills and only dial-up internet, Bookzoompa https://bookzoompa.wordpress.com/ debuted.

At the time, broadband was so limited that I had to use public access computers to post about the work I was doing in classrooms, which included images of student work and tutorials I created around those projects. My conviction was, and continues to be, that creating with paper provides a path to empowerment, and I can offer a way to get there.

Every day people download dozens of different instructional pages from my blog I get comments from all over the world.
As local internet access improved, I started making videos that enhance instruction. Right now I’m working on organizing information to make it more accessible. One example is a new page that organizes playlists for specific areas of interest. https://bookzoompa.wordpress.com/playlists/

Focusing on the blog and videos turned out to be serendipitous, because Covid changed my ability to work in person in schools. And with everyone in lockdown, bored and hungry for new creative pursuits, interest in my Zoom classes exploded. Since then, nearly all of my teaching is done online, and my current audience is mostly curious and creative adults. I’m also pursuing my own projects with art, paper, pattern, and structure. Still, it’s the work that I have done with and for children, and the work I’ve put into my blog and videos, that I am currently the most proud of.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

It’s been hard for some people in my life to understand my conviction about following my interests without questioning what the return will be on my investment of time, attention, and money. The only regrets I have involve the times I internalized those doubting voices, then stopped an activity or exploration simply because it seemed pointless.

Here’s an example of a regret: When my children were young and I had virtually no time for myself, for a few minutes each night I would put lines, curves and dots in a school composition book using Crayola markers. One day, before any of us had imagined that we could all have our own personal color printers, I looked at the funky patterns I created with my cheap materials and succumbed to the notion that what I was doing had zero value. I look back at those pages now, seeing the treasure trove of ideas, and am so sorry that I stopped when I did.

On the other hand, as my children struggled with math in school, my own interest in the subject was rekindled. I was finally wise enough to follow this interest without second-guessing myself. I devoured every resource that was available at the time, and struggled to understand mathematical concepts and their relationships to each other—and also to art. I had a few aha moments, working out creative ideas in ways that I wouldn’t have been able to do before.

For example, I became fascinated with Zhen Xian Bao, an ingenious system of different kinds of collapsible boxes that are mysteriously scaled to fit together. My mathematical skills helped me decipher how they work. During the lockdown, the time I spent deeply investigating relationships within the Zhen Xian Bao structure led to a collaboration with Susan Joy Share, a renowned book artist. Together, under the aegis of the Center for Book Arts in New York City and San Diego Book Arts in California, we taught months-long classes to dozens of adults, focusing on the ways to create the ZXB structure, and then how to be creative with them.

I didn’t start out having a clue that mathematical insights would fuel my art explorations. In fact, I sometimes felt embarrassed that I was spending so much time on quadratic equations and integrals, not realizing that revisiting math would be so profoundly important to my art. It’s such a gift that I didn’t fall prey to doubts. And I’m especially proud that in 2021 I also taught an evening Zoom workshop at the National Museum of Mathematics, which attracted 200 participants.

One thing I tell my now-adult children, and anyone else who will listen, is that the only worthless skills are the ones you haven’t learned. If you want to pursue something, do it. Following the threads of one’s own interests leads to unique places. And somehow you will always use what you have learned, even if you don’t know when or how.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

There are two ways I think about the rewards of being an artist, one external the other internal.

Externally, I am rewarded when my work supports others to further pursue their own creative journey.

Internally, my artistry pushes me to keep learning, hence my life feels fuller and richer every day.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://bookzoompa.wordpress.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/paulabeardellkrieg/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/PaulaKrieg
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@pbkrieg2410
• Other: https://bookzoompa.etsy.com

Image Credits
Photo of Paula Krieg by Hannie Eisma Varosy all others photos by Paula Krieg