A Bunch of Squares!

Several years ago I got a paper-cutter for Christmas and the sudden ability to cut paper easily and accurately was galvanizing. I haven’t been able to stop! There’s something both soothing and energizing about the crisp zip of the knife slicing through the paper. 

I often use the cutter’s protective metal 1.25-inch edging as a guide to chop a multitude of perfect little squares.

Pretty much anything provides fodder for the mill – discarded prints, old book pages, sheet music, greeting cards, hand-written letters, scrapbooking paper, the patterned inside of security envelopes – and then comes the fun of arranging the squares in a grid (usually three by three) until a composition “clicks”.

Sometimes, I vary the grid, like in the garden-themed cards below. (Apologies for the glare -- I forgot to photograph them before I packaged them.) The floral bits were printed with rubber stamps I'd carved.

A gift packet of beautiful origami papers inspired a happy afternoon of chopping and composing. For sticking down, I often use a UHU glue stick. You need a fairly "dry" glue to prevent wrinkling. However, for the garden cards, the papers were layered over a printed ink background. (You can spot the colour in the grid.) I discovered, after a while, the collaged papers would pop off. Think it had something to do with the oily inked background resisting the glue. It didn't always happen -- but often enough to be a problem. Yes! Paste proved a good substitute. It's a thick spreadable glue that must have a low moisture content -- it dries flat and doesn't wrinkle. If you find the paste too thick it can be thinned with something like Golden Glazing Liquid (a suggestion in Crystal Neubauer's book The Art of Expressive Collage) or Golden Open Acrylic Medium.

For a time I would chop up the previous year’s Christmas and birthday cards I'd received and make 3x3-inch gift enclosures. It was a workout for my brain to re-arrange the squares and come up with a good design. I also played with combining the graphic shapes of commercial paper punches with bits of ephemera. 

Food packaging also offered great graphics and I loved working with the text.

A stack of old Geographic magazines jumpstarted the gift enclosures below. I gave away the magazines and kept their brown paper wrappers!

I like working with strips of paper, too, trying to pair disparate patterns that somehow end up working together, creating a sort of visual “story”.

Here I'm auditioning pairs, looking for the magic "ah-ha"!

But I always come back to squares.

I'm between printmaking projects at the moment and, like many, feeling distracted by COVID-19 and the likelihood of a long and isolating winter ahead. Playing around with these little squares lifts my spirits and helps keep me in the studio and the ideas percolating.