Ray Besserdin

Ray Besserdin is an internationally acclaimed Paper Sculpture Artist from Melbourne, Australia, with 32-year career recognised and over 35 local and international awards. Born to artist parents, entirely self-taught techniques of sculpting dimensionally using only sheet-formed papers creating works that are much like bas-relief. His palette of papers are mostly mould-made cottons and hand made wide variety of mulberry, hemp and flax fibred stocks from Europe and Asia. The extreme beauty of the papers is best appreciated when viewing the originals where the delicate translucence of some of the papers can truly be seen, some of which are a mere 4gsm. The largest works astound viewers for their rigidity, while all made from paper. Inspired mostly by painters of the French Impressionist Period, he pioneered and developed an “Impressionist Sculptured Paper” technique to achieve their kind of aesthetic expression using sculptured torn papers three-dimensionally, where they used paint two- dimensionally.His works can be abstract to figurative ultra-realism. While likeness is important, the focus is to capture emotion, life, and expression over realism, yet always revealing the character of the papers from which the subjects are sculptured.