Serendipity

Here's a piece from a few years ago that led to a totally unforeseeable good bit of fortune. First, let me tell you about the piece. It is cut with an X-acto knife from a single sheet of Stonehenge paper. There was no preliminary drawing of any kind. I just started cutting and drew with my knife. Obviously, you can't erase when you draw this way. It took a lot of concentration to see where things were headed. It was rather hypnotic, and I hope it comes across that way to the viewer. I did a series of cut and torn paper pieces like this and I just hid them away, never having shown them in public, but imagining it would be a great show if I ever did.

Fast-forward a few years and a client sees this piece on my website, http://www.paintingtheearth.com/ and is interested in acquiring it. So I bring it down to Daniel Smith, where I used to work and where I still know someone in the framing department, and I'm waiting for the two ladies ahead of me to finish with their framing order. Cindy, the framer, suggests I bring my pieces out (I had two to frame) of my portfolio and start looking at moldings. So out comes "Maze" and all of a sudden the attention is shifted away from what everyone was doing and over to my side of the work table.

"That is gorgeous!" says one of the ladies. "Do you sell your work?" It turns out she is the curator for the Eastside Association of Fine Arts (EAFA) and they have a gallery at the Design Center where architects and interior designers and other people who buy art and have budgets shop. She all but guarantees that she would show my work. I gave her my card and she invites me to the next EAFA meeting, which happens to be on my day off. After many years of thinking my work was not right for a gallery, mostly because I do so many different things, and galleries want one-trick ponies who can stay on task and produce the same kind of work over and over, someone finally clicks with me. She wasn't really interested in my paintings - I guess anyone can make paintings.

In fact, when I am painting, I feel a kind of responsibility to the history of art. As much as I think my work is original, it is still bound by all the rules and conventions I have grown up with in the art world. But when I am cutting paper, I feel totally original. It's not as if it's never been done - the Japanese even have a name for it - Kitigama - and Kara Walker has recently become quite the art star with her cut-out silhouoettes of African American social history. But no one ever taught me anything about cutting paper. It's entirely from within me somewhere. Seeing the negative spaces and cutting them away reminds me of Michelangelo saying that to make a statue, you just carve away everything that doesn't look like the figure. I don't think Michelangelo really said that, actually I even once heard it in the form of an elephant joke - How do you make a statue of an elephant? - Get a block of marble and carve away everything that doesn't look like an elephant.

You can see other works of this kind on my website at the "Other Work" page. I'm working on a new one right now. I spent six straight hours on it yesterday. I think I probably have an hour or two left to go. I'll post it on the website when it's done. If these sell at the EAFA Design Center Gallery, I may be painting less for a while. I love painting, but I don't know if I'm a master yet (regardless of my Master's degree). With the paper cutting, I feel like I am.