Treasure Hunt
written by Donna Hecker & photography by Talitha Schroeder
Ray Papka has always been on the hunt. As a kid working a three-mile paper route, he kept an eye out for interesting objects along his path. They were a welcome distraction from rocky times at home, and he liked to imagine the stories behind each piece.
An old pocket-knife blade; smashed and rusted bottle caps; empty Bull Durham tobacco bags; the odd earring or fragment of jewelry. “Those found objects almost related me to the person who’d owned them. Or they connected me to the abstract world. I treasured those doodads.”
He told us about a smoke store in his Wyoming hometown. There were pinball games and a soda fountain ~ obvious attractions for a kid ~ but even better, the store sold cigars and the owner saved the empty boxes for Ray’s growing cache of roadside finds.
Those cigar boxes were outgrown long ago and none of their contents has survived sixty years and twenty moves. But he never stopped collecting and today Ray Papka has an entire basement in which to store found objects and the art he creates from them.
One large room holds raw materials and another displays finished (or nearly-finished) works. Many of them are large-scale pieces awaiting a gallery show, currently scheduled for 2024 at Lexington’s Pam Miller Arts Center.
And in the last year or so, his daughter Ouita Michel has transformed Holly Hill Inn into a rotating exhibit space. His brightly colored totems with their striking abstract designs and his equally captivating smaller pieces, made up of intricately assembled disparate elements, are all on full display. Now that her father’s art has joined works by her late mother Pam Sexton on the walls of the Inn, Ouita confides that “the joy of having their work at the Holly Hill Inn is one of the deep daily joys of my life.
The totems stand as pylons or gatekeepers: their bold bands of black, yellow, red, blue and green summoning us to explore the assemblages, full of mysterious images and found objects. The contrast is evocative of Ray’s own personality and how bursts of kinetic energy give way to quietly contemplative musings. An avid runner recharging body and spirit after a furious sprint.
His assemblages draw us into an intimate quest to seek and decipher the discrete components: a key, parts of a slide rule, clock gears, perhaps a celestial image. A singular article may carry particular weight ~ pieces of a dear father-in-law’s survey equipment; a former love’s chain mail purse. Tangible mementos from trips to faraway lands. All of these find their way into art which explores concepts of measurements and time, connections and life cycles, space and spirituality.
His training as a research scientist and his experience in the building trades have stood Papka well as an artist. His canvases are wood panels covered with watercolor paper and beeswax; empty drawers and cast-off fixtures salvaged from multiple home renovations; or weighty well-thumbed books. His tools include drills and saws, hammers and nails, soldering irons.
In that basement studio, a seemingly infinite number of cabinets and cases and boxes hold every conceivable kind of trinket or implement, some with known provenance and others long forgotten. Piano keys and strings, the innards of a burned-out radio rescued from a junk pile on Santorini, brass fittings from a railway car, still-functional general delivery mailboxes, and keys good for unlocking nothing but imagination.
Asked which came first, the object or the idea, Papka says while an object may spark an idea, he never knows where it will take him as one thing leads to another. He explains that the works coalesce as they’re being created. For this reason, he likes to focus on a single piece at a time unless it’s part of a series. Each piece is a puzzle to be solved.
Papka still forages for found objects, although less frequently than before. He compares such exploration to that of early hunter-gatherers; instead of food, he’s searching for objects with inherent beauty or the promise of an idea.
He describes his creative process as not unlike a chef’s. While daughter Ouita might play with different flavors and ingredients to create a delicious dish, Ray plays with scale, finishes, materials, and colors. And also like a chef, he’ll use different tools and techniques in doing so.
In Ray’s artist’s statement, he proclaims his passion for “engaging my visual system, hands, and memory to collaborate in my brain to take the discarded objects found around us everyday and to reinvent them into retrospective, pleasant and functional pieces of art. My art takes many forms, but keeps a theme of changes, of layers, of old, of memories, of looking back and of reutilization….”
Seeing his statement, Ouita completely agrees ~ (the part about) his work involving his eyes, hands, and memory coming together in his brain.. is exactly how I feel about cooking. Letting all the recipes and ingredients sift through your mind, through your hands, feeling it all come together once you're in the kitchen chopping and cooking, seeing the dish work its way to the plate, all the while building, evaluating, tasting. That is how we are similar. I likely learned this method from him.”
Ouita remembers that “my entire life, my parents were always creating. Dad built my doll house, made my bedroom furniture, made frames for Mom's paintings and batik prints. Every inch of our house was painted in a riot of color, with handmade shutters at the windows that Dad made and Mom filled with colorful fabrics.”
Today Ray’s art awakens a sense of discovery and delight made possible by the reincarnation of mundane, discarded, and abandoned objects. His work speaks to the intrinsic value possessed by even the most lowly article and reminds us that artifacts are all around, waiting only to be seen with fresh perspective and infused with new worth.
Ray Papka shows us the possibilities of exploring on two planes: the physical world and the mental. With his art, he’s created a new realm from the two. It’s foraging at its finest.
© 2022, Holly Hill Inn/Ilex Summit, LLC and its affiliates, All Rights Reserved
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Forager Storey Slone explores a local wildlife area with us, looking for edible wild plants and fungi. Along the way, she shows us that collecting and preparing wild-harvested products is a labor of love. A connection to the natural world and a reminder to be thankful for those things that are often invisible and yet bountiful in our daily lives.
