My Favorite Simple Machine

I have loved scissors ever since I could remember: the way they fit my hand as if they were holding me back, the way they open like wings and close like a beak, the satisfying crunch you feel as the blades slice through paper, and whispered slish! they make as they zip, open-mouthed, up the edge of a roll of wrapping paper.

Scissors!

They are my favorite simple machine. They’re the dearest, most beloved use of incline planes.

Scissors!

There are scissors you can use (the snub-nosed ones if you’re wee) and scissors you can’t (my ma’s super-sharp fabric scissors if you’re me). There are left-handed scissors, and pointy-tipped scissors, and scissors for nose hairs and tin.

At one time or another, I have used them all, and not always in manner for which they were designed. (I’m right-handed, for starters, so I ought to leave lefty scissors be. And I’ve cut cardboard with tin snips, cut some fishing line with nose hair scissors, and used the pointy-tip ones to add another buckle-hole to my leather belt.)

All that said, my favorite thing to do with my scissors, almost any pair of scissors, is make collage. I draw and I paint and I write stories and I teach, but collage is like all that stuff cut into pieces and glued down to the same board.

For example, check out this piece, which needs a better title. I’ve only ever called him “Rooster.”

Usually, I sketch things out, maybe add color a bit at a time, but with collage, I open up more. I don’t worry so much about the outcome and just play. For “Rooster,” I had a couple old 1950’s storybooks, the kinds kids used to read in school, that had full color illustration on every other page.

Gorgeous books. And I love books.

And I agonize over cutting up books. But these books were already damaged. They’d been rained on and stored in a basement. They had patches of mold so thick I could scrap it off in layers (with scissors).

So they were on their way out as books.

But as art—they were still in their prime.

All that age, the ravages, the discoloration, in my mind, just adds beauty to the paper. And so I cut out those illustrations and start playing with them as shapes. Cut closely to the edge of the shapes, slowly easing the two handles closed, and back open again, turning the paper round and round as I do. So if you look close at the rooster, at the edge of his wings, you’ll see creamy white with red bars. Follow that to the right, to the very tips of his wings, and you’ll see how those feather-tips are legs of a king's white stallions.

Now go back to the rooster’s tail, and find the dark mass just under the curve. Turn your head sideways, to your right, and you’ll see the wicked old crone from Snow White. Now find the light blue of the rooster’s wing, and tilt your head to the right again. You’ll see a dark-skinned man in a cone-shaped hat, wearing a fairytale tunic. And one more: find the yellowest part of the rooster's throat. Turn the image upside down. You’ll see a child wearing a yellow shirt, she’s got brown hair lightened by sun.

So, it’s a trick, in a way. A shortcut I’m taking. I using the colors these other (mostly forgotten) illustrators devised, these colors the printers matched and pressed out by the thousands. I’m taking these images out of their context, away from the rest of their backgrounds, and I am seeing them not as witches, or children, or horses or clowns. They become just shape, just color. And I can twist them. I can chop them. I can slice them an shape them how I will. Even split them down the middle, like I did the praying girl in the bright green dress, for the rooster’s tail.

Yeah, scissors. I’ll never give up my pencils (which you can sharpen with some scissors), but if I had to choose just one other art tool, it’d be scissors. Because with a pair of scissors in your hand, the world is your palette. Old books, discarded candy wrappers, worn linoleum, silk fabric samples, your old math book, your mom’s phone book, your shirt.

There are colors aplenty, a plenty of scissors to cut them all.

Snip, snip!

Happy Scissoring,

David Bernardy

www.davidbernardy.com