Running With Scissors

Since before I can remember, I was making things. When I was a kid I painted, I doodled, I stitched, I glued and I cut every picture out of every magazine. (Let’s just say there were a few “talks” at the dinner table about who might’ve been responsible for the the missing photographs in our prized set of encyclopedias — why are you looking at me?)

When I arrived at art school in the early 1990s, large-scale abstract paintings were king — and collage wasn’t even allowed into the castle. For the first few years I did the usual drawing and painting, but by senior year, my scissors had snuck their way back into the studio. In my painting class, which was my major, I was cutting chunks from my stretched canvases, sewing the pieces back together, adding paint, and cutting some more. Personally, I was thrilled with the result, but when I hung them for my class critique, I was accused of “setting feminism back” because, apparently by cutting and sewing, I was stating that female artists weren’t capable of being museum-worthy fine artists — that women could only be homemakers. Huh? I was angry, but I was also embarrassed and absolutely horrified that anyone might think I was saying women couldn’t make “REAL ART”, so at the tender age of 21, I put my scissors down — and, unfortunately, I allowed them to stay down for almost two decades.

On a random trip to the thrift shop in 2010, I came across a 1970s book titled something like, “The Complete Illustrated Journal of Cacti”. Um, how could I not buy it for a dollar, rush home, and cut out every single succulent? And that, as they say, was that. Suddenly no book was safe — my art kid was back, and she was running with scissors!

Today, I happily spend hours flipping through books, found on the dusty shelves of my local thrift shop, snipping out the treasures hidden inside. I have folders organized by theme for my cuttings — flowers & plants, women, men, couples, cats & dogs, Queen Elizabeth, food, furniture & frames, hands & hair, legs — and the super weird list goes on from there.

Somewhere in the flurry of my cutting and categorizing, I realized all of these lovely bits ‘n pieces could be used to tell stories. By taking images out of context, and placing them next to, on top of, or under another found image, the possibility for bizarre visual stories becomes limitless! Very quickly, my collages went from stacked cacti, to tiny people interacting with, and responding to unexpected objects and elements. I cannot even begin to express the ridiculous amount of joy I feel when carefully extracting teeny tiny people from the pages of old European travel guides so I can place them into completely new and imaginary surroundings. Because of me and my scissors, these former tourists are now right at home in worlds filled with thick swashes of paint, piles of glitter, colorful pompoms, and whatever else I feel like putting in there.

I’ve been making and selling my mixed media work for years now, but more importantly, I am finally having fun in the studio again. Being an artist is all about looking inward. What do you love? What truly brings you joy? What makes you feel like a kid again? Don’t worry about galleries or buyers, trolls on the internet or ghosts from long-ago art school critiques — just make what you want to make. I want to cut things out and glue them onto other things, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

Hey, Mom and Dad — you better lock up the encyclopedias because my scissors and I are back, and we’re making REAL ART.