Normally when I interview an artist for a 5enses profile we meet in their studio and sit down for a conversation. When I arrived at Paul Landis’ studio, he instead put me to work. He keeps a demonstration mobile handy, and as he walked me through assembling it, he pointed out some of the principles at play in designing a successfully balanced piece of kinetic art. It was a great introduction to this unique art form, and an excellent educational method — once you experience it, you can develop much firmer grasp of the concept.
Paul makes mobiles. He moves through the world seeing how things move, what leads the eye from one spot to another. He studies gesture. When you suspend an object and then hang another object opposite the first, you create a center of balance, or a fulcrum. A mobile is a kinetic dance of objects balanced in space, using gravity to create a sense of weightlessness. The innovation of mobiles as an art form is usually credited to American sculptor Alexander Calder (1898-1976), whose works you may have seen in museums or art books. Making a mobile requires great precision, including a lot of math to calculate differential weights, so a mobile artist needs their whole brain to pursue their art.
Paul’s process begins with sketching first the motion, or where he wants to lead the eye. He works mostly in abstract forms, cutting shapes from sheets of aluminum alloys and balancing each one into the overall composition. Once assembled, all the elements come off again to be painted. Along the way he is playing with color combinations on his iPad. He spends a lot of time working on the colors he wants, and then, in the paint booth, often ends up doing something completely different.
Paul describes himself as a “recovering Alaskan.” He came to Prescott the first time in 1980 to study aviation at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. While here he met local artist and character Bill Wade, who was devoting his retirement years to building mobiles and bringing movement into every corner of his home. As an architect, Bill was able to calculate mathematically where every bail or weight-bearing connection point should be. Paul was taken with the whole process, from sketches to finished mobiles dancing in the breeze.
Thirty years later, after successful travel and aviation careers in Alaska, he returned to Prescott to take up his own retirement dreams of living a creative life. Channeling a lifetime of interest in art, he began to tinker in earnest with building mobiles, teaching himself mostly through trial and error. He participated in his first Prescott Artists Studio Tour in 2018, while still operating out of his garage. Today he is among several artists who have studios in the Sixth Street Business Park. He’s there working nearly every day, in a space filled with movement and color. He has come full circle.
Paul does most of his cutting, shaping, and balancing work by hand, but has come to rely on one very specialized tool to get what he describes as “the sumptuous curves.” That machine is an English wheel, which consists of a flat steel wheel that turns against a round steel wheel, through which you can feed a sheet of metal to stretch it, bend it, shrink it, and create compound curves. Nearly everything Paul makes these days goes through the English wheel at some point.
Paul was introduced to art by his grandmother Alex, an art educator who demanded that her grandsons use free expression and disapproved when they made conventional drawings of houses or cats. He developed his appreciation for structure and balance while running companies with hundreds of employees, intuitively embracing bottom-up approaches, paying attention to how individuals react to those around them and how the whole organization reacts to outside forces. “Organizations are like mobiles in many ways,” he says. “They have to stand on their own, realizing the potential of their composition, and they have to respond well to changes in their environment.”
Paul cites his influences as sculpture, painting, ceramics, and most especially music. He describes his studio as having a bebop vibe, and he currently has a Miles Davis quote rolling around in his head: “Sometimes you need to play a long time before you sound like yourself.” Paul has been seriously playing at this for over ten years now, and is constantly refining his voice in his work.
He has had many commissions, and checking out photos of them when you visit his studio is worthwhile. When creating custom pieces he takes into consideration lighting, shadows and air flow, and works with the client on colors if they wish to have input. People often assume you need a high ceiling for a mobile, but really all you need is a space where you’re not going to run into it. He welcomes the creative challenge of a commissioned piece. “A lot of houses that I work in are beautifully designed and decorated, and even a single piece of kinetic art can make all the rest come together. Of course I always suggest my clients consider multiple mobiles as well.”
Paul recently started adding wall-mounted kinetic pieces to his repertoire. Up to 52” wide and mounted at eye level, they contain suspended pieces like in his vertically hung mobiles, with just enough movement to catch your eye. “I love the dimension of these and how they come off the wall. I’m also working on overcoming my fear of color.” Paul sprays as many as 14 coats of different colors on any given piece and has a subtle touch with the airbrush.
Paul’s work can be found locally in Van Gogh’s Ear on Whiskey Row. He is also represented by K. Newby Gallery in Tubac and the Saper Galleries in East Lansing, Michigan. Paul is part of the Art on Sixth Street consortium, which has open-studio days regularly throughout the year and every third Saturday during the summer (on Facebook at arton6thstreet). He also participates in the Prescott Area Artists Studio Tour in October. Paul is in the studio working on or thinking about mobiles almost every day. He can be reached or visited at 697 Sixth Street #100, or at landismobiles.com.
