Enjoy Magazine - Northern California Living
Creative, Expressive Palul
Interest | December 2009
Story: Beth K. Maxey
Photo: DevenCarter.com
RENAISSANCE ARTIST PAUL RIDEOUT
Paul Rideout calls himself a Renaissance man – artist, scientist,
teacher, writer, philosopher – and for more than 40 years, he’s
intertwined art and science to produce unique ceramic pieces with
universal themes.
As an artist, he was first introduced to clay in 1969 and
immediately realized it was the perfect medium for him.
“Clay was like the thing,” he says. “It took art and science and
melded them together. To me, it’s like a 3-D surface to create upon,
paint upon. It is still just as creative, an inspiring and wonderful way
to express myself.”
His colorful, multi-tiled pyramids, each seven feet high, were
installed at the McConnell Arboretum & Botanical Gardens at
Turtle Bay in 2008. He spent a year working on them, designing the
250 tiles per pyramid to depict scenes in his beloved North State.
Some of his raku art pieces are exhibited through Jan. 15 at
Redding’s City Hall, 777 Cypress St. He has taught ceramics and
raku, an ancient clay-firing technique, for some 25 years through the
Shasta College Extended Education program.
Scientist Rideout has worked in medical and research technology
labs since 1962, retiring just a few years ago from Mercy Medical
Center, where most recently he implemented and managed the
laboratory information system.
He grew up in Massachusetts and lived in the country where
“my universe was the woods behind me,” he recalls. “It got up my
interest in natural history – to learn the names of birds, insects, fish
in the brook.” A curious child, he also was fascinated with Indian
lore, especially among the Plains Indians, and made headdresses and
Rideout gravitated to a college major in zoology because of his
love of the woods, and graduated from the University of Rhode
Island. Because of his degree in science, he was offered a job in a
hospital laboratory as a medical technologist, which proved to be the
foundation of his career.
“But there was something in me that wanted more, something
else,” he says. And he began a seven-year journey, mostly among the
East Coast, San Francisco and Hawaii, working for six months in
medical technology or research labs, and then quitting to discover
the world and do art.
“I was writing, drawing, painting, having experiences,” he smiles,
remembering. “As soon as you say ‘I AM,’ there is a paradigm shift
from wanting to be to being. It took a lot of time striving in that
direction, to accept what I am.
“All my (working) life has been walking a line between life and
death and balancing that,” he says. “Art helps get through the heavy
stuff; the medical gives art balance. If I were just an art person, I
wouldn’t have had the experiences I have had.”
During one of his San Francisco stays, he was at the Human Be-In
in San Francisco when Timothy Leary delivered his famous “turn on,
tune in, drop out” speech, and he eventually wound up in Haight-
Ashbury, where one of his roommates was Peter Cohon, now Peter
Coyote. But when heavy drugs and crime moved in, he moved back
to Hawaii where, as one of the first hippies to live there, he enjoyed
near-celebrity status for a while. He and his first wife moved
to Redding in 1969 where he began working at what was then
Redding Medical Center.
For a time, Rideout lived near Montgomery Creek Falls and
says, “It left an imprint on me.” His works include many images of
the falls and area rivers.
Rideout tells his students that great, lasting art includes
universal ideas like heaven, earth and man that everyone can relate
to, no matter what the culture or language.
“Things that are universal are going to speak for a long time
– 100 years, 1,000 years from now someone may be feeling the
same thing you did,” he says. “Genius is taking the universal and
bringing it into the scope of your work.”
Rideout’s art is signed with the name “Palul” these days, a name
which began when as a manager he was writing lots of e-mails at
work. An extra ‘L’ kept creeping into his signature ‘Paul,” and he
finally accepted it as a message from a higher entity rather than
merely a misspelling.
“There was more here than meets the eye,” he says, “so I changed
my art name from Paul Rideout to Palul. It’s more earthy.”
He smiles, and quips, “If you have an old pot signed by Paul
Rideout, he’s a dead artist now and it’s very valuable.”
Palul’s work can be seen on his Web site, www.palul.com, at
Redding City Hall through Jan. 15, and at the 5 Windows Gallery
and Main Street Gallery in Weaverville. He has written three
books; selections from them are also on the Web site. •
Paul Rideout aka “Palul”
Web site: www.palul.com
E-mail: paulrideout@charter.net