I truly believe that "Even ordinary life can be immortalized through art". I have always been awed by the mystery of how people are connected and for most of my life as an artist I have looked for new ways to express what was inside of me, what I was feeling and how I wanted people to view and understand what I wanted to say. This caused me to restrict my art to forms that others could understand. I was speaking to the masses, but I was not using my own voice. Over time I realized that it was not so important weather people truly understood what I was saying but rather that I was speaking so I started to look for the way to think out loud and be heard and have found that voice in papercutting. My work is a mixture of Eastern and Western Art that I started after a visit to China in 2004. While there I discovered the ancient and demanding art of Chinese paper cutting and line drawing. On my return from China I began to make connections between the craft of paper cutting and my years as a soldier. The results of this unusual connection have been beautiful two and three-dimensional metaphors of the importance of time and the fragility of life and democracy.
The process is a mixture of sculpting and paper cutting. Each piece is designed to mix the ideas of traditionalism and POP culture. The work is made using aluminum and mirror paper to give the pieces a reflective quality letting the viewer imaging them-selves as part of the story.
While most paper cutting are laid flat on the board these works are placed between two pieces of glass in an open frame allowing the light to cast shadows on the background, making these papercutting sculptures of art. The other aspect of this work that is different from traditional paper cutting is that each piece is individually designed and not mass-produced. This is an important aspect of my work as it is about keeping the appeal of POP art while reducing the images to singular forms.
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