Cut Paper Play

When I was about ten my dad was told he couldn’t stick his hands in oil paint and turpentine anymore for the sake of his health. He worked primarily in oil painting at this point, so I imagine this was a big blow to him. But artists are adaptable and full of work-arounds, and this limitation imposed upon his artistic practice ushered in a new era of cut paper collages that would last from 1993-1998 and would go on to inform much of his later work.

These cut paper collages were deeply related to his stained glass works - and especially the studies/maquettes that often preceded them. But they also stood firmly on their own and declared a new way forward. One that was loud, expressive, sentient, joyful, bold, confident and poised. They declared an artist no longer coming into his own, finding his way, but arrived.

My own cut paper work also come out of a time of strict limitations. Like many of us I spent time under house arrest during Covid, including multiple two week stints in a house alone, with a million dollar fine if I so much a stepped on the sidewalk outside of my house. Quarantined, alone, with no studio, no supplies. My brother brought me some paper, coloured pencils, and paints for my birthday, and I started working at the only space available - the dining room table. I’m a messy artist in the studio generally speaking, but at my parents’ house, on their very nice dining room table, that wasn’t an option. The work that began there evolved into a whole new era of cut paper work for me - and eventually extended into using cut paper stencils in my printmaking also.

These cut paper works use colour and shadow to create something of an aura - a phenomenological experience that goes beyond their technically two-dimensional nature. They are from a literal perspective flat painted sheets of cut paper, and yet they function in the realm of three-dimensionality and sculpture. They go beyond their seeming limitations, and somehow make you look at what they reveal rather than what they present. The subject and object are frequently inverted. The subject is always for me the transient effects the work creates, rather than the art object itself, and in this respect I’ve been deeply influenced by both abstract expressionism and my mother’s stained glass installations/projections. Colour relationships, shadow and light, time and space, duration, materiality, and cyclical rhythms are all deeply embedded in my work, and I find it is best experienced over time with natural light drifting in and out of ‘activated states’ as it responds to weather and in/direct lighting conditions. It performs differently under artificial gallery conditions - presented in its most ‘ideal’ state - but I personally prefer the way it performs within the chaos and messiness of everyday life. The way these pieces surprise you by highlighting shifts in lighting, or making the time of day somehow more present and visible and vivid.

For both Stuart and I, the inclination to work with cut paper comes both from its organic and direct nature, which ties straight back to childhood when we were first exploring making with form and colour. It also has been inspired by a deep love of Henri Matisse and his work - especially his Jazz series, which are some of the most original, fresh, and alive works of their time, and seem not to age at all, presumably because they came from a very ‘young at heart’ moment in Mattisse’s life.

It also occurred to me recently that Stuart and I were roughly the same age when we made the pieces in this exhibition. Our artwork is obviously quite different, but the synchronicities are also striking. As Leonard Cohen said of his relationship with his great friend and fellow poet Irving Layton, “we don’t always agree on the answer, but we agree that the question is of great importance.”

Stuart and I have talked a lot recently about the nature of play. About whimsy and intuition and flow, and also about the rigorous nature of play, the depth of it. About serious play and silly play and how they relate. About low brow and high brow I suppose, and what a fine line it can feel like sometimes. In art when we lose the sense of play, we lose some essential part of ourselves. But if we don’t treat play as a serious occupation, as something deep and meaningful and beautiful - if we speak of it too flippantly and forget to accord it a sort of reverence as well - then we unintentionally undermine the depth and importance of play.

Play is how we test limits, how we practice and learn, how we explore and create, how we forge our interests and ultimately our sense of ourselves… And this is more obviously true for artists, but I believe in some way it is true of us all.

–Thea Reid