Let's Go Fly a Kite

by AnnaJo Vahle

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Dimensions

15.000 x 12.000 inches

Title

Let's Go Fly a Kite

Artist

AnnaJo Vahle

Medium

Mixed Media - Paper Collage

Description

As I created this collage I kept thinking of flying a kite. I used black construction paper and cut them into a variety of kite shapes. I arranged the elements in a way that might create a sense of rhythm.
This is part of a series of collages that I did several years ago. I thought of the great Matisse.
In 1941 Matisse was diagnosed with cancer and, following surgery, he set about creating cut paper collages, often on a enormous scale, called gouaches découpés. By maneuvering scissors through prepared sheets of paper, he inaugurated a new phase of his career.
Matisse was hardly new to cutting. It was already present to him as a descendent of generations of weavers, who was raised among weavers in Bohain-en-Vermandois, which in the 1880's and 90's was a center of production of fancy silks for the Parisian fashion houses. Like virtually all his northern compatriots, he had an inborn appreciation of their texture and design. He knew how to use pins and paper patterns, and he was supremely confident with scissors.
The cut out was not an renunciation of painting and sculpture: he called it “painting with scissors.” Matisse said, "Only what I created after the illness constitutes my real self: free, liberated.” Moreover, experimentation with cut-outs offered Matisse innumerable opportunities to fashion a new, aesthetically pleasing environment: "You see as I am obliged to remain often in bed because of the state of my health, I have made a little garden all around me where I can walk... There are leaves, fruits, a bird."

Matisse generally cut the shapes out freehand, using a small pair of scissors and saving both the item cut out and remaining scraps of paper. With the help of Lydia Delectorskaya he would arrange and rearrange the colored cutouts until he was completely satisfied that the results. It took two years to complete the twenty collages and, after years of trial and error, a practical and appropriate method was agreed upon for bringing the collages to life as two-dimensional works.

This paper collage is 12 inches by 15 inches.

Uploaded

March 19th, 2021

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