Karen Paust - Bead and Button Magazine

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As I enter a driveway in rural Pennsylvania, I’m uncertain whether I’ve found the right place, since I can’t see a house. As I proceed, a rabbit scuttles in front of my car and hops down the center of the driveway, over a rise, and into a wooded hollow, where I find Karen Paust’s house. Before Paust’s two-year hiatus from beading, she was working on moths. This year she picked up where she left off, completing two tiger moths.
Creative childhood Painting, drawing, knitting, papermaking, sewing, ceramics, gardening, cooking: You’d be hardpressed to find a creative pursuit that isn’t part of Paust’s repertoire. Our conversation wanders over granola recipes, hunting for morels, and starting plants from seed before we settle down to the topic at hand: how she became a beader. “I’ve always been a creative person,” says Paust. “I made doll clothes when I was six. All I wanted Paust’s mobile titled Pond features five distinctly different goldfish suspended from actual roots and vines. Five insects, including two dragonflies, hover above the fish. Photo by T.E. Crowley to do as a child was make things.” Paust’s urge to create was nurtured by her mother and grandmother. Their ability to sew, knit, and spin was vital to their survival in a destitute East German town during and after World War II. Such austerity wasn’t part of Paust’s childhood, but it’s evident she takes great pride in and even inspiration from the self-reliance and resourcefulness that sustained her relatives through hard times. Discovering her artistry “When I left for college, I had never had any art classes,” she says. “I was studying botany at Purdue University, and I enrolled in a basic design class for fun. That class changed everything. I just loved it. I realized that every time I looked through the microscope at cells, I was more interested in the colors and shapes and doing the drawings than in the scientific aspects.” Paust went home and told her parents that she had to go to art school. She enrolled in summer art classes so she could assemble a portfolio and was accepted at the Maryland Institute College of Art. “When I got there, I had all my academic requirements finished, so all I had to do was draw and paint for three-and-a-half years,” she says. Beads become her medium After graduation, Paust got a job in a gallery in York, Pennsylvania. Making a living as an artist was a struggle, but her frugal lifestyle led her to beads. “I couldn’t afford to buy jewelry, so I bought beads to make myself simple earrings,” she recalls. “I played around with the beads and realized they fit together like cells. I saw that I could make anything I wanted. Without knowing what I was doing, I taught myself peyote stitch.” At that point in the early 1980s, there were no books to consult or beading classes to take, so Paust improvised through trial and error, intuiting the stitches. She says, “It’s worked to my advantage that I wasn’t exposed to conventional jewelry making and beading. I just jumped in with what I knew about cellular and molecular structure.” When she wore her jewelry creations, people asked her where she had bought them, so she started to sell her work in stores and galleries. But she really wanted to make beaded paintings. “I was interested in making large pieces that light could shine through,” she says. This desire also inspired her to make mobiles. 116 Bead&Button | beadandbutton.com
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Karen Paust - Bead and Button Magazine

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