Jenny Grevatte | Drawing with Scissors

As a practicing artist I've always allowed myself a bit of time where I'm not doing finished pieces. I just allow myself maybe three months to play and experiment and I think this is really important otherwise you start getting in a rut with your work and it was during one of those times and I was about to start experimenting and I was tidying up this pile of coloured papers on the floor here but I was just looking at them in their own right and thinking how beautiful the colours were and how they went so nicely together and maybe I could use them in their own right and just make some collages. I just thought I'd reference Matisse because he's been such an influence throughout my whole career and during the end of his career he started doing these cut paper famous very beautiful cut paper pictures and he talked about using the scissors to draw with. There's this nice photo of him doing exactly that and that's what I did too. You need a nice sharp pair of scissors and rather than drawing on the back the shape that you want use the scissors to describe the shape and estimate it and you get this lovely flow. It is just like drawing and the other thing I learnt from Matisse is when you cut out a shape you're left with a negative shape which often gives you ideas in its own right. You can sometimes make use that or pass of that so I might take that to suggest another area elsewhere within the picture. So the first one I did was from this old drawing of a cape primrose. I absolutely love cape primroses the way they're magnificently shaped flowers just seem supported by themselves and these wonderful angles that the leaves make and that was the version that I did. And after that I didn't really use the drawing so much I just free-wheeled with cutting out the shapes and playing with them and there's a couple there where I've just been inventive with the textures of the paper and the simple shapes placing one in front of the other and seeing what would happen. So after enjoying the still lives I thought well maybe I could do the same thing with landscape maybe I could play around with some landscape ideas and then I remembered that I had a vast source of sketchbooks going back 20-30 years many of Cornwall and also of all my trips abroad so I thought well maybe I can use those as starting points. So this was the first one that I did using the cut paper collage idea from this drawing that was it summer 2005 this was done so a nice bit of recycling of an idea and I've had the lovely painted paper I used to make a horizon on the pre-painted board. This is one of the many versions I've done looking down into the bay at St Ives. I love the rooftops and particularly the angular church tower coming up all these lovely siennas so I did several versions as collages. So I've got one midway through here I start on a pre-prepared piece of mount board it's a nice thick museum quality mount board which I've put a layer of gesso on and sometimes I put some additional paint on as well but for this one it's just that coloured gesso as a ground. This is the drawing that I found we had a couple of really lovely trips to San Gimignano and I thought the composition with the towers would work really nicely the shapes against the sky so that's where I've got so far and I can describe to you how it's been done with perhaps making a tower and then placing it and then of course you've got the option to alter the angles alter the relationship and that it becomes a problem in the end there are so many possibilities you can push and pull take away add put things behind one another and the problem is making a final decision where is everything going to go and then deciding to stick it down and I have got that and then realized well actually I want to take it all apart in order to stick it down and I'd done quite a few of these before I realized that if you take a photograph it at this point it's really very helpful and you can refer back to what it's going to look like when you've stuck it down so I do that routinely now but using torn edges perhaps I can show you we have tree shapes on the sketch and actually carefully tearing the paper and I enjoy that as much as the working with the scissors you can draw with a rough edge to suggest the foliage of the tree for example sometimes it works a lot better than a cut one so I might place that in front of a cut one so it's it's a great way of playing with composition color and texture and just inspiring it's just exciting to do something new and different