♪♪♪ Sylvia Smith: I cannot recall exactly what I had to do to qualify for that summer program in the arts.

It was at the University of Nebraska and they would bring students from around the state and you would stay for like two weeks.

They had like art, theater, we stayed in sorority houses.

There was an article in the university magazine.

I was taking a sculpture class.

My roommate was a girl named Alice Bertanen.

She was from Lincoln.

We became quite close.

I would go to the student union.

There was a man there hanging a show and I was watching him.

I looked at this guy.

And oh my gosh.

He looked like an artist brooding.

His hair was a little longer than most of the guys' in the '50s.

His name was Corban LePell.

And Corban LePell was hanging pictures that he had painted.

Abstract Expressionism was really getting a lot of attention.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Sylvia: I had not had much contact with artists, so I went over to him and I said, "What is that?"

Well, he kind of looks at me with kind of a haughty look.

"You're not for art," because I did not know what is art, you know, was about.

I was kind of taken aback.

I studied Abstract Expressionism to learn what it was about.

But I still had this curiosity about this man.

He had an art studio, so I would go in there and see what he was painting and he happened to have this picture hanging there.

I stole the picture.

Not nice and, of course, that picture was part of the scrapbook that I kept on Corban.

Oh, I should go back a step.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Sylvia: My childhood was spent in the '40s and '50s in a small town in Nebraska surrounded by corn fields and the smell of alfalfa cooking in large drums at local mills.

I remember, as a quite a young child, I was given a lot of coloring books, paper dolls.

I was read to a lot.

My dad taught business subjects in high school, typing and shorthand, bookkeeping.

My mother had been an elementary school teacher before she married.

My parents rented a big old house, and they kept six women teachers.

Mother cooked their meals.

I was an only child of maybe two or three besides my parents.

I had six women entertaining me, reading to me, singing.

We had an old piano.

Of course this was during World War II and I think some of their husbands or boyfriends were in the service and that's why we had all these women staying with us.

I can remember drawing little pictures or I'd write to my grandparents and I would draw them little pictures in my letters.

I didn't have any art in school.

High school did not offer an art class either.

All of a sudden, I got interested in a comic called "Tillie the Toiler" and a little paper doll was always published with the Sunday comic and they would say that so-and-so had drawn the dress that they were showing with the doll.

Hm, that's interesting 'cause I like paper dolls.

So I seemed to be starting to draw more clothes and for paper dolls.

And so I began keeping scrapbooks and this is scrapbook one.

It's gotten kind of beat up.

There's the original Peggy.

She went through life being my model for a lot of clothes.

My ideas from the larger world came from movies.

I loved watching Fred and Ginger, Judy Garland, Dean Kelly, Betty Grable, and others float across the screen.

Around 1950 in junior high, the idea of taking a sketchbook to the movies came upon me.

♪♪♪ I would draw the clothes very quickly while I'm watching the movie in the dark.

♪♪♪ I redrew the clothes and I put them into these scrapbooks.

I have eight of them.

So I did put my own clothes that I wore in 11th grade.

It looks to me like I wore an awful lot of sweaters and skirts or some of them are the same skirt with a different sweater.

And then I did have some fuller skirts.

That was the era when the skirts were really big.

You wore a crinoline underneath.

I've had pretty good wardrobes.

My mother made clothes for me or we would go shopping and she liked clothes and I was always usually dressed quite well.

♪♪♪ male announcer: Do you do this too?

Does a pencil in your hand start you sketching on any old piece of paper, drawing heads or figures or little things or maybe your dogs?

If you like to play around with a pencil, chances are you have the basic interests needed to help you become a serious art student.

Art instruction schools will send you free without cost or obligation this simple art drawing test.

Experts will examine and grade your test.

Sylvia: If your drawing was really excellent, they would give you a correspondence art course free.

Well, of course my drawing wasn't up to completely to their standard or whatever.

Of course, they send out a salesman.

He comes to the house and he's showing me the books.

They had a basic lesson with perspective and shading and, you know, some of the things that you would need to know if you're going to be an artist.

Oh, I wanted to take that course.

One book was on fashion illustration-- of course the thing I did the best on.

♪♪♪ I don't remember how I got his address because I did send him a letter and Corban answered my letter.

"Dear Sylvia, well, I was pleased and surprised to hear from you.

You know, really, it was my way, my very first fan type letter and an immense amount of flattery abounded around my soul.

Art is a quality.

This is indefinable.

Art is a way of life.

You must remember that there are no absolutes in art.

You must exclude from your mind preconceptions of what modern art is.

Sylvia, I hate writing letters, but I enjoyed this one very much and I hope to continue hearing from you.

There is so much to say and not enough time.

Sincerely in love from another artist, Corban."

I was thrilled to get a letter from him.

And he said, "My wife and I would enjoy having you visit us."

I didn't know he was married or anything, but I didn't, that wasn't a part of my interest really.

I was more interested in his art, being his artist.

My roommate Alice invited me to come to Lincoln, still summertime, and visit her at her home.

Alice and I cooked up a plan.

Her father would take us down to the theater, like we were going to a movie, but we had told Corban to pick us up in front of the theater.

Ooh, he came in a little old car called a Graham-Paige.

We had on these big full skirts with crinolines.

We had to squeeze into his front seat in his car.

He took us to his apartment.

There's mobiles hanging, colorful pillows, butterfly chair, typical apartment decorated by an artist.

And he had a guitar, he sang and played to us and we were silly and we had to watch the time.

We had to get back to the theater.

We pulled it off.

When I did go to school there in the fall for some art classes, and I'd take a peek in and see what Corban was doing in his art.

He did some paintings for a music room at the university.

I have a painting that I bought from Corban for $25.

He was my introduction, I guess, to the art world in a way.

He's someone I never forgot.

And my daughter and my kids have heard the Corban story.

A lot of people have heard that story.

One of the classes I took at the university, I mentioned to the professor that I really wanted to be a fashion illustrator.

He said to me, "Fashion illustration is kind of a dying art.

They're going more for photography and fashion.

You'd be better off teaching."

I made the decision to go ahead and work toward art education as my degree.

Of course, being an art teacher, I had to be able to do a variety of different things with children, you know, in different--I did pottery, I did collage, markers, watercolor.

We did, you know, we used a lot of different materials.

One thing I did do that was a part of a master's I was working on from the University of Buffalo was filmmaking.

That was the '70s, early '70s.

That was something that none of the other art teachers were involved with in the district.

I had the children do animation films where they did a background scene and then they had little cutouts that they would just move a little bit and take two frames of each move.

When it was projected, it would look like the character was actually moving.

Then we would have a show at the end of the year where all the kids from school would come down and I'd show them all the films and we'd even have popcorn and stuff.

♪♪♪ I was doing some film work of my own at that time too.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ I did do oil painting.

At one point, I've always been interested in collage and doing transfers.

Rauschenberg inspired me a lot.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Around 1980, I read an article in the "Family Circle" about paper dolls.

I hadn't thought about my paper dolls in quite some time.

I discovered that there were a lot of people who collected paper dolls.

I started drawing paper dolls again.

I had been to Paris and so I did this book with Fluffy, the cat I had, and her clothes that she would have worn on her trip to Paris.

I haven't been doing work like this for some time, where I actually put together a whole book.

I have thought about it.

I've done two dolls of the Barrymore family.

I've done one of Ethel Barrymore and one of Georgiana Drew Barrymore.

I haven't told Drew, the real-- the young Drew--that I was doing a paper doll of her family.

I would like to, but I need to do Drew and I need to do her grandmother Dolores Costello.

That's something on my plan list that I haven't actually completed.

1984 was my first paper doll convention.

By that time, I was buying paper dolls from other people and was acquainted with some of the top names in the paper doll art world.

A lot of them were at that convention, so I was so excited to meet some of these artists and just in awe of the wonderful work that they were doing.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ A lot of times they were working in watercolor and some in marker.

female: We're doing all these fellows here and Leonardo and-- oh, yeah, beautiful, great.

Okay.

Very good.

male: Thank you.

female: Thank you--for you to share, Jim.

Sylvia: The paper doll world became like a family because you would meet these people at the conventions and we would write to each other and we would do round robins.

I did a ton of where we would send a doll around and each person in the Robin would make a costume and then you got to keep it, keep all the costumes and everything if it had been your turn to do the doll.

Sylvia: One of the paper doll artists that I met came to visit me here in Buffalo.

He lives in Toronto.

His name is Bruce Patrick Jones, and he presented me with a paper doll.

I said, "Bruce, how did you know I had an orange suit?"

He says, "Well, don't you remember?"

He said, "I took photos from your scrapbooks."

I had a book published by my friend Jenny Taliadoros.

She does "Paper Doll Review."

She saw my paper doll book of jeweled costumes and said she would like to publish it.

I made the outfits by pasting the jewelry pieces together in a kind of collage.

Then I redrew them and painted them in with watercolor.

The paper doll world has been very much a part of my life now from the '80s, '90s, 2000s on up to today.

I still am in touch with a lot of these people.

I did receive an award called the Fanny Gray Award.

I was not expecting that.

It's for people that have worked for years at conventions and so on.

So I retired in '92.

Fifty-five sounds pretty young right now.

I was already doing some male art.

♪♪♪ I found out about it through a magazine called "Rubber Stamp Madness" and another one called "Stampagraphic."

You could find other people that would like to do exchanges.

Sending postcards, letters that were decorated with rubber stamps, drawings, collage.

Oh man, I ended up exchanging with maybe 40 people.

Most of them were from United States, but I did branch out to Luxembourg and Amsterdam.

I just got tons and tons of wonderful male art.

Beautiful collages.

I had about nine big garbage bags full of cards and letters and stuff that I had collected over a period of years.

I got a computer in '96.

A lot of the same people that had been doing the male art moved over into the computer world and we still organized book exchanges.

We did what we call altered books where you took a real book and you would cover the pages with paint, collage, whatever.

You might have a theme for that book and you would do these exchanges with a group of other people.

Your book would go around to each person and they would do some more pages.

So when you got the book back, you had art from a variety of people in your book.

I did "Migration to Kansas."

I did a painting, sort of an overview of a farmland.

You kind of get the feel of the land.

And I made handmade books.

You had to create enough copies to send to all the people in the group, four or five people at the most.

Sylvia: I have some of my own books that I made.

I used the poetry of T. S. Eliot.

I found some old photographs that went along with the thoughts in the poem.

I think this was a book I did in an art class where we did like a fold out.

We painted papers first and then cut it and fit it into our book.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Sylvia: I met Nail Vagapov through a male art postcard type project in Luxembourg.

A address list and the people that were in the show was sent to each participant.

Nail Vagapov wrote to me and said he'd like to exchange letters.

Of course, I grew up in the Cold War era and we had no contact with Russians and we were scared of them.

Turned out this Nail Vagapov was an art teacher in a school, I think, for quite--for talented art kids.

He lived in a place called Sterlitamak in the Ural Mountains, about a thousand miles from Moscow.

I put together art from my students and I sent them to Russia.

I would get these black and white photos from Nail, of students looking at the art that I sent to Russia.

And he sent me art from his students.

Well, I was just blown away by the art that he sent.

The quality was--he would say 4th grade, but I thought my 4th graders weren't doing that skilled work.

We continued writing.

He decided he wanted to have another exchange.

And by that time I had retired and I thought American Indian art would be interesting for an exchange.

So I went over to Guanda and talked to the students and I told them about the exchange.

Well, they did come through for me.

I had some of them do God's eyes or some paintings.

He sent back block prints by his students with chiefs and canoes and teepees and stuff.

They seemed to know quite a bit about the American In-- at least the standard stuff.

Then we had a third exchange from his adult group that he belonged to in Sterlitamak.

I got some wonderful work from professional artists.

♪♪♪ He sent me a lot of his own art.

He was a--mainly a printmaker, block printing and etchings.

I haven't sent him so much of my own art.

Of course, I wasn't doing a lot with paper dolls and stuff over that period of time.

Finally, we were on the internet together.

And we even could talk to each other and I could see him.

Kind of an amazing change in how things went from, say, the early '90s up to, you know, into the 2000s.

I haven't really been doing much in the paper doll making lately.

I have a blog called "Art Every Day by Sylvia."

I started doing the digital collages, where you'd take one image and place it over another.

I was learning how to use Photoshop and I would do one every day for several years.

That was early 2000s, up through the last couple of years.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Sylvia: I kept track of what happened to Corban.

He ended up being a teacher at Hayward State in California and he had several children and so on.

I did get in touch with his daughter through Facebook.

He actually called me on the phone.

That was 2016.

We talked a lot on the phone for quite a while.

He said, "Why don't you come on out to Oakland?"

So I did.

And I met Corban again.

Of course, he was not in too good of health.

He had breathing issues and he was not walking too well and so on, but we watched about 14 movies together that--I was there for a week.

We spent one day going through some of his artwork and he actually gave me some of it.

Hey, that was a lot of years.

A lot of years.

My actual production of artwork has changed.

I haven't been exhibiting a whole lot.

I do keep a sketchbook.

Now, that's pretty much been one of the areas that I have tried to keep--at least keep going with my art a little bit.

I really enjoy drawing faces.

I find inspiration from magazines and TV like Mika and "Morning Joe" and, Drew, of course-- I love her show.

I've had to think about different aspects of my life and how they all fit together.

Art has been in my whole life.

I've enjoyed the experience.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪