Born in 1933 in the Black Hills of South Dakota, Leo was graduated from high school in June of 1950, the start of the Korean War. He then spent the next four years in the Navy on Far East operations.

Shortly after his discharge, he entered Chouinard Art Institute where, with the exception of his first semester, he was a Disney Scholar.

In 1960, he began his career as a graphic designer, and did his first paper sculpture. His work has been used by numerous clients in publishing, advertising and promotion and he is still very busy in these areas of illustration.

His fine art began in about 1980, and for the most part is based on his memories of life as a young boy at the foot of Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills - a life peopled with miners, loggers, cowboys, farmers, and the Sioux. The work is entirely symbolic of the elements that were around him at that time, especially the plants, animals and artifacts. Unique in portraying these images with the paper-sculpture collage medium, Leo's techniques are a blend of both Impressionism and Surrealism

The recipient of numerous awards, Leo is twice past-president of the Society of Illustrators of Los Angeles, and a recipient of their Life Achievement Award. He is also a 35-year participant of the U.S. Air Force documentary art program, as well as founder of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's documentary art program.

He currently resides in North Carolina with his wife, Karen, a foreign correspondent, who enables Leo to live life like "God in France!" His staff consists of two dogs and a cat.

Leo Monahan, America's foremost paper sculpture illustrator, has lived among us for several years now. The Silver Fox Gallery represents him in Hendersonville. He lives in Barnardsville, enjoying a stunning view across a cove toward a rising forest of mixed hardwood and evergreen trees. Among the many greens on the slope are touches of gray-brown: two very old, very tall, very dead trees to whom Monahan speaks from time to time. "They have gone to a place where I will eventually go," he says, adding that perhaps the trees know some things that he does not.

It is not a large jump from admiring dead trees to creating a series of paper sculptures with the title "Autumn Leaves and Butterfly Bones." He likes to explain, with a straight face, that the spidery forms left by decaying butterflies and other insects are their skeletons. Thus fall is a time of finding "butterfly bones" among the fallen leaves. This is an ongoing project, creating works that combine paper leaves with delicate and intricate insect outlines. The series' whimsical title is characteristic of this artist.

Monahan was born in Lead, South Dakota and would likely have followed his father and grandfather into the mines, had he not served in the Korean War and then used his GI Bill educational benefits to study art at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles County (now the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia). Walt Disney's estate was the college's largest benefactor, and Monahan became involved in various Disney enterprises. Over nearly fifty years, he taught color to Disney employees and was an independent contractor for Disney amusement parks. In his latter years contracting for Disney, he was creating paper sculptures that were then measured, digitized, and through Computer-Aided Design became large-scale metal figures that you may have seen at Disney parks.

Monahan's studio and storerooms take up most of the lower level of his house in Barnardsville. There are many bookshelves, some obscured by pegboard hanging completed and framed paper sculptures. Cabinets clutter the ancillary storerooms, filled with found objects and with pieces of folded, torn and painted two- and three-ply Bristol paper that will be incorporated into future sculptures. Also on file are hundreds of his poems, including many haikus. Alongside the studio there is a small office for his wife, Karen Martin. But as she is a life member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and spends much of her time commuting between Los Angeles and Stuttgart, her husband has even appropriated some of that room as storage space.

Among the framed pieces of finished work are some that remain as mementos of past projects in California. For lobby art during a Ventura production of Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot," Monahan created sculptures representing characters associated with Godot. (You will recall that Estragon and Vladimir, who await the arrival of Godot, don't really know much about him. Monahan created a mythical back-story.)

Beginning Friday, Nov. 14, in Asheville Community Theatre's spacious lobby, Monahan's paper sculptures will be on display in a series showing ordinary people with lumpy figures dancing. They dance to hide grief or loneliness. They dance to express joy. But they dance. It will be an appropriate accompaniment to Asheville Community Theatre's production of "NunCrackers," a Nunsense Christmas musical. As Leo Monahan says, "If it is not either fun or funny, I am not interested in it."

South Dakota, Southern California and Southern Appalachia have little in common except for the five letters s-o-u-t-h. But the first two locations figured importantly in the artistic development of Leo Monahan, America's foremost paper sculpture illustrator, and the stimulus provided by our region will shape his future output.

Monahan was born in Lead, S.D. HBO devotees know that Lead (which is pronounced "leed" and means an outcropping of ore) is just a ten-minute gallop from Deadwood. In 1874, General George Custer's expedition arrived and two cultures collided. The new arrivals, with a philosophy of "Manifest Destiny," discovered gold and soon were fighting each other over the titles to gold mining claims. The Sioux felt they too had claims, albeit of a different nature. Their nomadic culture (appropriate in a region with less than 20 inches of annual rainfall) had no concept of land ownership. Cutting into the face of the Black Hills was like cutting into your mother's breast.

Monahan's grandfather and father were both miners, and Monahan might have followed in their footsteps had he not served in the Japanese occupation forces during the Korean War. Using his GI Bill, he then studied art at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles. Walt Disney had taken an interest in the school, and when Monahan received a Disney Scholarship, a long involvement with the Disney enterprises began. The Chouinard Art Institute merged with the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music in 1961 to become the California Institute of the Arts ("CalArts") on a splendid campus in Valencia, built with funds from the estate of Walt Disney.

Monahan was involved with Chouinard, Disney and/or CalArts for 50 years before moving to North Carolina. He taught color, served as a Disney contractor, and had access to the model shops and the specialized techniques used for set construction for Disney amusement parks. Fresh out of school with a few other designers and photographers, he started a business that created cover art for over 1,200 records. Selling that business, he did freelance illustration for 10 years, then began an advertising agency.

He began paper sculpture in 1960. By the late 1970s, paper sculpture had taken over his life. Since 1987, he has done nothing but paper sculpture, both as an illustrator and as a fine artist. Generally using Strathmore 2-ply and 3-ply kid finish papers (and sometimes using watercolor paper or handmade papers), he tears and cuts the paper into three-dimensional sculptures to which he applies color with an arsenal of techniques.

His fine art has primarily been topically based upon his childhood in the Black Hills and especially on symbols arising from the Sioux or from nature. Masks, feathers, pottery, boats and birds appear frequently. Now that he has relocated to Barnardsville, his art is influenced by his new surroundings. He is currently working on sculptures inspired by the autumn forest floor in this region. Patterns representing fallen leaves but with distorted scale will be prominent.

He is represented locally by the Silver Fox Gallery on Main St. in Hendersonville, who featured his work through June 30 with great sales success. "And when the end of June came, they wouldn't give me back the unsold pieces. They just asked me to deliver some more!" says Monahan, pleased to be in his new home and with a new gallery connection.