Canvas to the Imagination

The saying goes, “when life hands you lemons, make lemonade”. But what should an artist do when a piece of art with hours of work already invested into it starts turning to lemons?

I don’t often find myself in this type of situation because I am a process-driven artist and I don’t have a specific result in mind from the start. I am interested to see how something will evolve as I work. But once in awhile things still go awry.

The two cut paper vessels that I’m sharing in this blog post began life as a single piece of 19″ x 25″ black paper. My intention was to make a large rectangular structure I could hang from the wall. The more I worked on it, the less I liked it. I realized I was happy with the paper cutting but the structure was too boring. It also reminded me too much of a decorative designery thing for candles that someone would buy from Crate & Barrel.

I decided to salvage the situation by cutting the paper in half with the idea I would create smaller individual structures from each piece. I couldn’t leave it as one piece because I’d already scored the paper for folding into a rectangle.

I’d left an uncut edge along one side of each piece so I could attach a piece of paper and create a bottom to the structure. The first strip of cut paper became a wide cylindrical shape. It’s about eight inches in diameter and nine inches at the tallest point.

With the second strip of cut paper I decided to aim for an irregular structure. I had the piece of paper curve around three circles as the bases and wound up with what you see here. It was an experiment, and the end result is a bit wonky but interesting.

As a side note, the paper I used for these was a bit lighter than I normally work with and I think it may be a bit too delicate for creating more structural pieces. Working with black was also a nice change from all the white I’ve been doing lately.

Thank goodness this piece was flexible enough to salvage and transform into something else. I think what I’ve ended up with has turned out to be much more interesting than my original idea.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been preparing for my upcoming solo show in July at the Ranger Station Gallery in Harrison Hot Springs. The exhibition is one part of the annual Harrison Festival of the Arts, which includes an art market, workshops, and plenty of live music.

It’s this musical aspect of the festival that has led me to create more instruments from paper. My friend Siobhan, a musician as well as a visual artist, loaned me a violin and a tambourine to use as reference. The violin proved to be a much trickier object than an acoustic guitar to puzzle out and reproduce as a three dimensional object in paper.

The tambourine was relatively simple by comparison. What I like best about making instruments from paper are the problem solving skills that kick in as I try to puzzle out how emulate some piece of the object normally carved from wood, or made from metal.

I will be making one final instrument for the show, a mandolin. I’m really hoping it will be easier to reproduce than the violin.

First there was Art. Next was Make. Now here is also the word Create as cut paper typography. Little did I realize when I started that this would become a series, but creating words is a bit addictive.

As with the previous two words, Create was freehand cut from a piece of 8.5″ x 11″ red card stock.

All of the cut paper typography work is available as a print, iPhone case, and more through Society6.