When something catches Tom Paiement's attention, it can lead the Woolwich artist on a journey of indeterminate time, possibly years.

It has happened again and again for him. Paiement, 71, stopped in a California guitar shop about 15 years ago and began watching a man playing scales.

“He was so fluid, his pacing, his timing were so incredible it kept me engaged for about half an hour,” Paiement said.

His observations inspired him to make a large drawing of a scale. A friend saw it and bought it.

The artist followed up with two years of work on about 60 paintings, which he called his “Fret Series.”

Paiement is a multimedia artist. Some pieces in the “Fret Series” included working electronics and found steel.

Another start to a creative journey came in the form of a door panel. Inside the abstract design Paiement made on it, he spotted an image. That inspired his “Entropy Triptych,” a statement on man's complexity as conveyed in three, six-foot-by-seven-foot pieces.

“Things seem to evolve, based on an impulse I might have visually,” Paiement said in an interview at his studio, across the Kennebec River in Bath. “One idea, with the work still unfinished, leads to another idea.”

“So it ends when it ends. I never know when that will be,” he said.

During a drive over the river with his wife, commercial artist Maret Hensick, the lights of Bath Iron Works caught his eye and inspired a painting.

“If I don't do things I am really inspired by, I lose a lot of my ideas,” the Brunswick native said.

He was an aerospace engineer when he got into art at about the age of 25 and saw some visually powerful, large collages an artist had done on plywood.

“For whatever reason, I just was knocked out, and I realized I wanted to do that,” he said.

Paiement applies his engineering skills to his work; when he makes a mark, he steps back to see if it is working for the piece. It's an attempt to fuse impulse with analysis.

“That's always the goal,” he said.

He recently had an additional goal, when he based a piece on his 16-year-old rescue cat Hobbes. Paiement did it to raise money for the cat rescue organization “A Paw in the Door.”

He saw the donation as a way to serve the community, and help animals. “Our cat is so endearing to us, that whatever I can do to help raise money to keep groups like that together, I'm going to do,” he said.

The piece combines drawing, collage and linoleum cut. It will be up for bids with other artists' works in a silent auction June 29 at the Winter Street Center in Bath.

The event, which runs from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., will feature music and hors d'oeuvres. Tickets are $10 in advance or $12 at the door. For more, visit www.pawinthedoor.org or call Paw's president Patty Sample Colwell at 207-751-7408.

Paiement has a website. He welcomes visitors to his studio, and can be reached at 207-650-4719.

Susan Johns can be reached at 207-844-4633 or sjohns@wiscassetnewspaper.com.