Becoming an artist, and a small announcement

I first started cutting paper 9 or 10 years ago, when a coworker taught me some basics with some paint chips we found in the local hardware store. I've been creating paper images ever since, sometimes in great bursts of making, sometimes setting it down for months at a time. My skills finally match my taste. I used to see potential papercuttings in the world and immediately dismiss them, knowing my skills weren't quite up to the level of doing them justice. Now, I can make a plan for how I might achieve them.

Pangolins are a delight, and this papercutting in particular got me thinking about charismatic wildlife as a lens through which we focus on their habitats.

There's one word missing from the above paragraph: artist. I majored in biology and environmental studies in undergrad, and have my Master's in Natural Resources; I have very little education and training in art. I'm not very good at drawing with a pencil and paper; what's easy for me to cut from paper is hard in graphite. I struggle to find my way through an art supply store. I'm not as familiar as I'd like to be with language around art. I've always called myself a person who makes things. Yet in the last few years, I've frequently found myself wondering how I could add more movement to my work, developed series on various themes, tried to figure out how my work connected people to the subjects, looked at ways to grow my skills to do my subjects justice.

I've been thinking like an artist.

I’d like to do a whole series of pollinators on the species they pollinate, and have been trying to take as many pictures of pollinators this summer as I can!

It's a strange thing to integrate a new title/identity into your concept of your self as an adult. I'm lucky that I have a truly astounding number of people calling me an artist, even when it's a hard word for me to claim. 

Mammals are their own challenge in my mind; I’m comfortable with the crispness of invertebrates and reptiles, but the squishy fuzziness of mammals is intimidating! It’s been an area of growth for me this year.

I've had friends ask me when I'd start teaching others in my art, and there's still a little astonishment in my response. I'm happy to teach about the natural world, but who says I can teach art?

But also: who needs to? Who am I waiting to grant me permission?

I’d wanted to make a turtle for a while, but they always came out so static, like an identification diagram. Having this one swim towards the viewer helped resolve that, and figuring out how to differentiate the shell from skin was its own challenge.

When I first started, I cut everything by hand; then, a friend gave me an old Silhouette they weren't using, and my brother gave me a Bamboo tablet he wasn't using, and I started cutting everything by machine. These days, I do a mix, sometimes drawing into my computer, sometimes handcutting and then scanning the result so I can reproduce the piece using my machine. It's been one more thing that has kept me from calling myself an artist, something with deep roots in gender and arts vs craft; I use a tool that's used by scrapbookers, so what I do can't be called art (said my faulty logic, as if what scrapbookers do is less than, as if activities that are primarily done by women are less than. Brain, why?)

I'm not sure precisely where I'm going with this, other than to say that I'm thankful to those who have called me an artist, even when I was (am?) having a hard time seeing myself as one. I'm proud of the skills I've developed over the years, proud of the work I do, and happy to share the results with others.

I've always given most of my work away; many of my designs were made with a particular person in mind. But I've developed a bit of a stash of papercuttings, so if you'd like one of mine, you can find a few of them at PutteringWithPaper on Etsy. Let me know if there's one you'd like that isn't there; I've only listed the ones I've been able to photograph so far. Summer is my busiest season at work, so I'm hoping to list cards and some other things in September.

I'm excited to send my art (art!) out into the world.