COVER STORY : Paper Artist : For more than 30 years, illustrator and graphic designer Leo Monahan has made his living creating paper sculpture. His works have been photographed and used for everything from children’s books to billboards.

Paper is artist Leo Monahan’s medium. Plain white, fine quality drawing paper that he cuts, paints, bends and folds into vibrantly colored, elegantly textured three-dimensional illustrations--of birds in flight, flowers in bloom, a football player in motion.

“Paper has so much integrity, and you can do so many things within a very tightly constrained series of possibilities. You can do almost anything within bending, folding, cutting and painting,” said Monahan, who makes his home in Burbank and his studio in his garage.

“It’s like a scale in music. You can either write a simple children’s tune, or you can write a symphony within that same scale. Playing in the third dimension is really the bonus.”

For more than 30 years, the 59-year-old illustrator and graphic designer has been making paper sculpture, although he prefers to call it “paper in dimension” now.

“I call it ‘paper in dimension’ because I’ve brought traditional collage and traditional paper sculpture together,” he said.

Today, his client list includes Toyota, Coca-Cola, the Hollywood Bowl and Nintendo, to name just a few. His works have been photographed and used for everything from magazine advertisements and posters to cookbooks, annual reports and billboards.

USC football fans can find his depiction of a Trojan gridiron warrior on billboards in the Coliseum area. A beautiful butterfly dominates a Varig Airlines billboard at Highland and Franklin avenues in Hollywood.

“Leo is the quintessential paper sculptor. It’s like going to the master to have anything done in his technique,” said Mikio Osaki, executive creative director at the advertising agency Batey Poindexter, which has Varig Airlines as an account. “He’s developed it into such a fine art. Not many people in this country can do what he can do.”

The Children’s Museum in Chicago is currently exhibiting 35 of Monahan’s three-dimensional paper works, some of them completed for children’s books and Sesame Street magazine. The show is sponsored by Hammermill Papers, Monahan’s biggest client. As all of Monahan’s commercial clients do, Hammermill uses photographs of his original art in its promotional materials. He has done 15 paper in dimension pieces for the company during the past five years.

“We were asked by the client to come up with a new and exciting magazine insert campaign,” said Robert Fuller, a vice president at the BBDO advertising agency in New York and the Hammermill Papers account supervisor. Inserts are placed in national publications for the print industry and magazines targeted at advertising and design professionals.

“We’ve had wonderful results with Leo’s sculptures. They’re very memorable, and have played an important part in keeping Hammermill in the forefront of the field. His technique is paper, so it was a natural. The dimension is as important as anything.”

It was in 1960, as a partner in Studio 5, a photography and design business in Los Angeles, that Monahan created his first three-dimensional paper sculpture for a client--Liberty Records.

Monahan’s artwork depicted a man in a truck lowering a box on a hook into the truck. The image was used in an advertisement that proclaimed, “Liberty Records Is Moving.”

From then on, “people kept asking me to do paper sculptures,” he said. “No one had ever taught me anything about it. I was inventing it.”

During the 1960s and ‘70s, Monahan continued to do flat graphic illustrations and designs while he pursued his paper sculpture work.

“I never had a job. I was either a free-lancer, a partner in a studio, a studio owner or an advertising agency,” he said.

In 1986, after Leo Monahan & Associates Inc. spent six years as KNBC-TV’s advertising agency--designing hundreds of print ads, and producing on-air spots and radio campaigns--the “immutable law of advertising saved me,” he said.

“Eventually, you will lose every account you get,” Monahan recited. “I lost the account.”

He moved his studio to Burbank, and decided to do only paper sculpture. Through representatives in different parts of the country, he received commissions from commercial clients for his three-dimensional illustrations. But, Monahan also began to tap memories of his South Dakota childhood as a source for his first fine art pieces.

His great-grandfather came to the Black Hills of South Dakota in 1875. A miner, he also operated the first sawmill in South Dakota. His great-grandmother arrived by coach in 1876.

Born in 1933, Monahan grew up in Lead (pronounced Leed), S.D., site of the Homestake Gold Mine. During World War II, however, he and his family moved to the mining town of Keystone. It sits in the shadow of Mt. Rushmore.

“I lived a barefooted, idyllic, Tom Sawyer-like childhood for four wonderful years among the mountains, trout streams, wildlife and pines that make the Black Hills look black,” he said.

In Keystone, Monahan encountered miners, cowboys, lumberjacks, forest rangers and Indians.

“Ben Black Elk--the son of the Oglala Sioux holy man, Black Elk--lived next door during the summer. I played with his grandchildren and spent a lot of time with Ben,” Monahan said. “I helped put up his tepee in the spring and take it down at the end of the tourist season. I spent time in his house where his Sioux regalia was hanging on the walls.”

Monahan’s fine art pieces, filled with feather- and quill-like forms, are “pure abstract art taken from my memories as a child of literally what those days and those things felt like to me,” he said. “I would never copy any Indian image or artifact.”

He was an unlikely candidate to become an artist. Like three generations of men in his family before him, he was expected to become a miner. In fact, he spent one summer during high school working in the mines.

But he had developed some interest in art in high school. While attending a career day event, he asked about art schools. School officials said they didn’t know of any, but they thought that the University of Minnesota probably taught art.

The Korean War started in 1950, the same year Monahan graduated from high school. He enlisted in the Navy--escaping a lifetime of working in the mines--and spent most of the next 3 1/2 years in the Far East. Particularly enthralled with Japan, he “immersed himself in that culture,” he said.

“The Japanese are the least mediocre people in the world when it comes to beauty. There is beauty in all aspects of the lives--their houses, their clothes, their food.”

On liberty in Los Angeles on Christmas Eve, 1952, he went to the Hollywood USO and signed up to be taken to someone’s home for Christmas dinner. Louis B. DeWitt and his family included him and another sailor in their Christmas Eve party. Although DeWitt’s daughter, Marilyn, was the main reason Monahan would visit the DeWitt home during the next year when his ship was in port, he also became friends with Louis.

It was DeWitt, an artist who owned a business in Hollywood making movie titles, who encouraged Monahan to pursue his earlier interest in art. He suggested that Monahan go to Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles on the G.I. Bill when he finished his stint in the Navy.

“It was a dynamic school time,” Monahan recalled of his four years at Chouinard, beginning in 1954. “I was taught an organic way of working.”

Today, Monahan continues to work organically. He cuts out the pieces of his designs--which are usually rendered first in sketches for his commercial clients--before he paints them with an airbrush. Then he bends, folds and glues them into his fanciful compositions.

“I never ever know what it’s going to look like because I can’t plan it accurately the way somebody doing a drawing or painting can do,” he said. “Even after I’ve done so many, I always wonder, ‘Is this going to come out right? Can I do this job?’ ”

Recently, he completed a piece for Toyota depicting numerous pairs of golf shoes all in a row. The image will be used in promotional materials for a golf tournament that the car company is sponsoring.

Pink hearts abound in his composition for a Valentine’s Day promotion of video releases of MGM films such as “Where the Boys Are” and “The Tunnel of Love.” He’s currently whipping up one of his concoctions for Eli’s Chicago’s Finest Cheesecake while also writing and illustrating two children’s books and doing his abstract artwork.

Monahan also finds time to serve on the board of the Los Angeles Child Guidance Clinic and to run the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department’s documentary art program, which he began in 1972. To do that, he became a reserve deputy sheriff in 1973.

Although he relishes doing his fine artwork, he has no desire to quit accepting commercial assignments.

“I enjoy being an illustrator, I really do,” he said. “It has always excited me to get an assignment from an art director in some other part of the country, in some other part of the world, and do this thing and excite them, and solve a problem of selling a product or service.

“Fine art is a completely different game. You do it all by yourself with no motivation other than a motivation from within. You may like it or not like it; you have nothing to measure it against.

“With an illustration you sure do. You have all kinds of competitors shooting at you, illustrators working in every other medium, and photographers. But in fine art, you put it in a gallery and people wander in and out, and you have no idea what they think about it unless somebody actually gets excited and pays money for it. It’s really different and I enjoy both, but for different reasons.

“With paper, I really am a frog in my puddle. It has really worked out to be the best thing that I ever started working with. I have a feeling for it, I respect it, I experiment with it constantly, and I’m able to get images that not only I like, but that people like and can use.”

Where and When

Exhibit: Leo Monahan’s paper in dimension art will be on view in the Peppertree Ranch Art Show in the Santa Ynez Valley north of Santa Barbara on Nov. 8.

Admission: $5.

Call: For information on art show hours and location, call (805) 688-6205.