Bethel Park artist creates purposeful paper cuts without the ouch
Kathryn Carr had always wanted to visit Alaska, but when she got there she liked the state so much, she extended her planned two-month stay to seven years.
As a 1994 grad of Edinboro University of Pennsylvania studying art education, the Bethel Park resident had worked in a variety of artistic disciplines – pottery, fused glass, sculpture and jewelry. However, her diffused artistic involvement left her feeling “distracted.” While living in Anchorage, she discovered the solution to her dissatisfaction.
Kathryn Carr
“In Alaska, I decided I wanted to simplify my art and looked for something I could do anywhere,” she said. “I’d always liked block printing and thought of paper cutting as something simpler. Once I started paper cutting, I fell in love with it.”
For the past 10 years, she’s been supporting herself through her new art form, mainly through the sale of greeting cards at about 100 locations across the nation from California to Alaska to Maine. Her work is also in the inventory of several local art stores and galleries.
She also supplements her income by teaching paper cutting classes at venues like the Touchstone Center for Crafts, the Society of Contemporary Craft and the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh.
“In my classes, I like to offer different styles of paper cutting such as Polish and large scale wall hangings,” said Carr, who will offer one-day classes at the Society of Contemporary Crafts in Pittsburgh’s Strip District on June 2 and Oct. 6.
As to her own art work, self-described as playful and whimsical, she focuses largely on anthropomorphic animals such as bunnies hanging laundry, foxes dancing and armadillos and hedgehogs kayaking. Her images are created much in the same fashion as the traditional German scherenschnitte (pronounced sharon-snit-tah).
“Traditional scherenschnitte is done with scissors to create scenes of farm and country life,” Carr said. “They’re also symmetrical because the paper is folded in half before the design is cut out, then opened up again.”
The artist first draws designs on paper, then uses an exacto knife to cut out the shapes. She said she can get a lot of emotion from her designs, which come with a sense of movement and playfulness.
“I get a lot of my inspiration from books that were read to me as a child,” said Carr, whose favorite childhood stories were penned by Hans Christian Anderson.
In 2016, Carr illustrated a children’s book, “Lizbeth Lou Got a Rock in Her Shoe,” written by Troy Howell, after a friend advised her to join the Society of Children’s Books. Soon after posting her portfolio to the society’s website, a publisher with a story in mind saw her work and thought it would be a good fit. Since then, she’s also worked with musical groups to design the covers of their CDs.
As a board member of the Craftsmen’s Guild of Pittsburgh for the past three years, Carr is involved in planning the annual Affair in the Park, held in Mellon Park in Shadyside and scheduled this year from Sept. 7-9. She’ll also participate as an artist in this year’s Three Rivers Arts Festival, exhibiting and selling her greeting cards, prints and originals the second week of the event from June 6-10.
Among the commissioned work she’s received is a current project to create paper cuts for two volunteers who’ve donated their time for the past 20 years to Highmark Caring Place.
Basically self-taught in her art by experimenting with paper and tools, Carr said she enjoys reading about the history of paper cutting in different cultures and tries to keep up with what other colleagues in the field are doing. Nevertheless, she said she’s basically stayed faithful to her own style.
Her work is so distinctive that she said people familiar with it can spot it when it’s displayed at various venues, including one incident in Maine where visitors from Pittsburgh were able to identify it as hers before looking at the tags labels.
As to the future, Carr said she’d like to get involved in more book illustration and present her art in different ways.
Last year, she was commissioned to do the art for a year of bulletin covers for Ruthfred Lutheran Church in Bethel Park.
“This included a new piece of art for each holiday or special event (over 20 designs in all) as well as a paper cut depicting their church building,” she said. “The church will continue to use this as their bulletin covers in the following years.”
To view some of Carr’s work, go online to www.gocarrgo.com.