HUNTINGTON BEACH : A Labor of Love Needs a New Home

Walter Johnson has fashioned a giant, probably one-of-a-kind sculpture out of old copies of the Los Angeles Times. Now he’s looking for ideas on what to do with the papier-mache work.

Using about 100 pounds of newspaper, Johnson designed the abstract creation to fill a big alcove in his daughter’s home in Forrest Falls in the San Bernardino Mountains. He thought it would be a fine conversation piece.

However, Johnson, 67, who retired in 1985 as director of Huntington Beach libraries, labored sporadically on the project for nearly three years, and by the time he got it finished this year, his daughter had been transferred and the artwork was without a home.

Johnson has temporarily stored the 11-foot-high sculpture in his studio behind his residence; it’s too tall to fit in his house in Huntington Beach.

The work has form and structure and is “kind of neat,” especially when rays of sunlight filter through the holes of the structure, he said. Being abstract art, it represents whatever the beholder believes it represents, he said. To the eyes of some, it appears to be a tower of Swiss cheese shaped into a sea horse.

Johnson had planned to install a floodlight at the base of the sculpture for dramatic effect.

But he’s willing--even eager--to part with it if the right offer comes along, he said. And maybe even if it doesn’t.

To produce his sculpture, Johnson built a casket-like box about 15 feet long and three feet deep. He mulched newspapers into papier-mache, interspersing perhaps 150 balloons of varying sizes.

When the composition hardened, he deflated the balloons and removed them, leaving holes through the entire piece. He topped it off with a gloss of white paint.

Johnson said he believes the process and the work is unique. He’s never done anything like it or seen anyone else do it either, he said.