Brass Rubbings : Ancient Art Provides a Sanctuary

In a part of Inglewood noted more for crime, poverty and drugs than for the arts stands a small gallery--a sanctuary, its owner says--where visitors can find refuge in the 16th Century.

Gregorian chants in the background greet the ear at the English Brass Rubbing Centre, while the eye finds hulking, life-sized figures of medieval knights, ladies, friars and royalty.

The figures are brass etchings--reproductions of what were once tombstone covers for the rich and famous--that have taken on new life as an art form.

The art comes in rubbing the brasses--placing rag paper over the delicately etched figurines and sliding a small slab of powdered brass and hardened beeswax over the sheet, in much the same way children rub a coin with pencil until the details emerge on paper.

Detailed Reproduction

After several rubbings, the rag paper is burnished with a chamois cloth until it glistens. The result is an intricately detailed reproduction of the etching on paper that can be framed.

It is a craft so simple that even the young and unskilled can master it and so complex that some artisans devote their lives to it.

Gallery owner Paul Mattson is one of the latter. A recovered alcoholic--a gutter drunk, as he puts it--Mattson, 68, discovered rubbing as an art form during a trip to Spain in 1972, shortly after he achieved sobriety.

“It came to me in a dream--literally,” he said. “I was in Spain wondering what I should do with my life. I’d lost everything when I was drunk--my real estate business, my family, everything.

Told to Rub

“Then one night I had this dream, so plain, that told me to rub--so I did. I had no idea then that it was an art form of any kind. I went out the next day and got paper and crayons and rubbed any objects I could find. I wasn’t even entirely sure why I was doing it.”

From those improbable and vague beginnings, Mattson rubbed his way from the great cathedrals of Europe to cemeteries in Ireland and China, where stone rubbing is a time-honored art form.

A tall, broad-shouldered man with wild gray hair and a face as deeply etched as his brasses, Mattson attributes his continued sobriety as well as his current philosophy to his passion for rubbings.

“I believe in miracles,” he said. “I’ve come to believe that within every human being is the need to create. It is their birthright to have creative experiences without fear of criticism or failure. This provides it.”

Although visitors to the gallery at 803 S. Inglewood Ave. are infrequent at best--bookings are sometimes a month apart and the gallery operates by appointment only--Mattson said, “I’m where I’m supposed to be. I’m not saying I was saved from drunkenness to pursue this, but I feel this was meant to be.”

Living a spare life bolstered by earnings from the gallery, Social Security and the income from a few rental properties, Mattson said it is “more than coincidental that a once hard-rock atheist found himself spending all his time in cathedrals and churches. I recognize it as a series of miracles that began with my sobriety. I couldn’t account for it any other way.”

His mission now, as he sees it, is to bring this gentle and ancient art to those he believes need non-competitive, creative experiences the most: the poor, the handicapped and those who, like him, have fallen away from life’s straight and narrow.