Hazel Glass

ARTIST STATEMENT

Cutting paper is a form of meditation for me. As I get lost in the details, my knife follows the lines until they've led me to the destination: Delicate windows into abstracted worlds. There are up to 81 layers of paper in these intricate images with depth. They begin life with the whisper of pen on paper, gaining volume as the design develops, a clear melody of mood rising to the surface. Each layer of my originals is then hand-cut using an x-acto blade, and built up from those 2D drawings into bas-relief sculptures. My focus is on miniatures, as I firmly believe that bigger is not better, and find both the meticulous technical challenges and resulting delicacy of working small too intriguing to ignore. As such the viewer's attention is most often on the precision cutting or the subject. But I think the relatively unsung hero of my work is color.

Creating in colored paper is a delicious challenge. Picking out which hues I want for a piece is only the beginning. I have to figure out tints vs shades, full saturation vs tone, warm vs cool. Once I have a palette, I have to figure out the order. Switching around the same color choices from one layer to another completely alters the appearance of a piece, and not just in regard to value contrast. Putting a deep-toned orange next to blues is going to give you a very different look than sliding that same orange next to browns (which are actually shades of orange). I might use the same gray paper for three separate layers in a single piece, and it can look like a different color in each spot depending on the hues that surround it. Possibly for this reason, chromatic grays are my favorite color. 

When I discovered cut paper art, most of what I saw was cut out of a single sheet of black or white paper. It was never a question for me that I wanted to work instead with multiple layers, creating a delicate strata with my patterns, a sense of depth that changes the piece when viewed from one angle to another. But it was also never a question that I would use the full spectrum of color. Whether the palette is vibrant or subdued, it is an integral part of the work. And while the design is what my art is saying, color is the tone of voice through which each piece speaks.

Please visit my website at http://artbyhazelglass.com and follow me on Facebook and Instagram.