Paul Sietsema is an American artist, born in 1968, based in Los Angeles. He works primarily in film, painting and drawing. He is known for his paintings, drawings and 16mm films that explore how imagery, form and material affect our understanding of culture and history. Using a different medium at each stage of his studio work, he often alternates between physical fabrication and digital image manipulation. He works in series, developing groups of subjects, including painter's tools, newspapers, coins, rotary phones, paper money and museum exhibition posters from decades past. He renders these objects by hand with striking realism, employing laborious techniques that mimic obsolete methods of mechanical reproduction. When he makes a film, he immerses himself in a body of historical or contemporary knowledge and the images and objects associated with it, such as representations of abstract painting in post-war magazines, the décor of Clement Greenberg's New York apartment, cultural artifacts from pre-colonial Oceania, the philosophy of mind or the cinematic medium itself.