It's time to stop thinking of silhouettes in terms of black and white. Paper-cut artists like Los Angeles-based Karl Johnson are bringing the centuries-old art form into contemporary decor as the must-have trend of the season.
STYLE AT HOME: When people think of silhouettes, they often think of projecting a light onto a face in profile, then tracing the outline of the shadow on paper. How is your art different?
Karl Johnson: All of the silhouettes that I do are done freehand -- purely through looking at the subject, and then cutting the subject out of paper with a pair of scissors. It's the traditional way they were done. In the 1700s, the camera had not yet been invented, and if somebody wanted to have an inexpensive portrait created, they had no choice other than to go to a silhouette artist. They could have a painted portrait commissioned, but the masses in Europe couldn't afford that -- not even a sketch. So there were itinerant silhouette artists who did this very inexpensively, and you could capture the likeness of a loved one by having an artist look at you, and cut out your silhouette. I adhere to that tradition. The projection-and-tracing method came about in kindergarten and elementary school classrooms, and that's been a hurdle for those of us who are silhouette artists, in that the public may think that's how it's done, and it's not the case at all.
S@H: Where did you learn this centuries-old craft, then?
KJ: I'm just really old. (Laughs) Actually, my dad had always done them when I was a kid, and he learned from an immigrant from Austria years ago, so I'm sort of a third-generation silhouette artist. It's a skill that's passed down, and it was just inevitable that I would pick it up. I took to it really well because I can only see from one eye - I don't have binocular vision, so when I look at something, I can immediately see its shape in two dimensions. I really developed a knack for it right off, and started cutting very young.
S@H: When it comes to custom cut art, what are your clients looking for?
KJ: Now more than ever, they want to think outside the box, and this term “mod silhouette” has now entered the lexicon. Years ago, I would just do traditional sized silhouettes -- 5-by-7-inches -- and historically, silhouettes have always been done in miniature, in black, of just the bust, generally. Now, more than that, I do special requests in a variety of different colours and settings. People want to take a new spin on a really old art form, and I attribute a little bit of that to the recent iPod advertising campaign and some artists in New York who have played with the silhouette and revitalized the form a bit, like Karen Walker. I started pushing this heavily about three years ago, offering different kinds of silhouette art, thinking outside the box, it's really taken off.
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