Between the Folds...on origami...

Leap of Faith   acrylic/paper   29 x 19

We watched an amazing movie the other evening...."Between the Folds", a documentary focused on those who have become obsessed with origami....scientists, artists and mathematicians. This movie appeared at last year's Cleveland Film Festival but we were unable to attend, so anxiously awaited its release at Netflix.

Matisse said: Much of the beauty that arises in art comes from the struggle an artist wages with his limited medium.

True. True. True. Painting is an additive art. Sculpture a subtractive. Origami uses only one given....a square piece of paper that can range in size from a few inches to several feet. Some of our era's greatest minds have given up their lives to study this discipline, a wild combination of art, math and science, and actually believe that it might hold the key to solutions in medicine. Technique has exploded since the 60's when an origami work may have had a dozen folds compared to today's works that take several days and hundreds of folds to complete. Works using thousands of folds are on the horizon.

As technique has become more important, however, several practitioners have noted the inverse relationship between technique and emotion. The more technique.....the less emotion. And these same artists, whose work in origami has spanned decades, have endeavored, after achieving great technical feats, to reinstate emotion into their work by reducing their efforts to the simple, the expressive, the abstract. Sound familiar?

The work is a ballet in progress....yes, yes, yes. If the process is good, then the end result is an object that looks good. Orchestration. Dance. Music. Yes. It's all about process. Amen.