5 Things I Like That I Made for Our Upcoming Art Show
It all started with an X-Acto knife.
My role in the upcoming Kind & Funny art show, which is happening soon at the Denver Nook office opening party on Friday May 3, can be traced back to that purchase, which I needed to finish constructing Little Machine brewery’s robot mask:
I liked using it so much I googled “X-Acto knife hobbies” and found Wycinanki, a Polish paper-cutting folk art that reminded me of those snowflakes we used to make as kids. I’m actually one quarter Polish, but have never had any substantive family ties to that cultural tradition, so I was excited to give this art form a try.
The first thing I made was this:
After that I grabbed an old magazine and started cutting out shapes and figures and negative space, and I felt a combination of relaxation and compulsion and thrill. I haven’t stopped cutting things out of recycled magazines since.
The first round of cutouts went to fuel our bathroom-door collage, but since I kept making more scraps of cool things we had to keep making more art with them.
Honestly, I understand if this sounds weird, because it sounds weird to me too. It’s my first foray into visual art, but also I enjoy it so much that I kinda can’t help it, so I’ve just gotta keep going with it and making stuff that makes me smile or laugh or concentrate or feel happy.
Here are 5 things I made that I like:
1. A bunch of strange greeting cards
Usually these are things that I’ve cut out that sit around and don’t get used for a while in anything else, so in order to not throw them away I put them on note cards. Here is a selection of my experiments with color, negative space, and strange pictures:
Hallmark greeting cards cost like $5 these days, you can pick up any of mine for $2 (or 3 for $5).
2. A bunch of stranger print thingys
Usually these are the weirder things I make to make myself laugh:
There will be a bunch of these in the “Weird stuff Jed made” bin.
3. This bird
Things like this are a bit more in the Wycinanki tradition, and also we saw an amazing paper artist in Mexico and I like to try and practice some of her techniques:
4. This collage
Kel got a lot of old frames from Goodwill and Arc to make art on, and I claimed this one because the images really fit together:
5. A lot that has gone into Kelly’s art
Lucky for me Kelly has taken to repurposing stuff I cut out as well:
So yeah, that’s a bit of what an explosion of art looks like over here. If you’re in Denver during the Denver Nook office opening party on Friday May 3, come by Tennyson Street for First Friday and see the rest of it!
See something you like? Have any requests? Got any old magazines you want to give me? jed@kindandfunny.com.