Hunter Stabler - paper cut art (and a cool name too)

Detail from the Cockatoo is Moving Under You, Ink and graphite on hand cut paper






















Baba Yaga Misquotes the Face to Steeleye Span, Hand Cut Paper

Sator Square, ink and graphite on hand-cut paper mounted on plexiglass, 12 x 12 inches

Every once in a while, an artist pops up on my screen via my artistaday.com component of iGoogle that makes me stop to look. I encountered Philadelphia based Hunter Stabler in this way yesterday, and I've since looked stared and wondered at his work. If you take a look at his portfolio site, the most striking thing (well for me since I'm taking a color workshop class) is that there's no COLOR! He uses neutral colored papers to create his artwork, which are intricately detailed and cut to form spiritually significant objects and symbols.

His Sator Square, above, was in an exhibition recently at artist-run and curated Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Philadelphia. I wasn't sure what a Sator square was so I looked it up - this is what Wikipedia said: "The Sator Square is a word square containing a Latin palindrome featuring the words SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS written in a square so that they may be read top-to-bottom, bottom-to-top, left-to-right, and right-to-left. The earliest known appearance of the square was found in the ruins of Pompeii which was buried in the ash of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD."

It's a magic square! It has spiritual significance because it was thought to have magic powers to ward off evil. The closest translation is 'the farmer Arepo has works wheels', which isn't a great sentence but it's amazing that it can be read identically forwards, backwards, up and down.

Side note: also at this exhibition was the work of Adam Parker Smith, who showed a stunning collage of diamonds. He successfully created the multiple facets with triangular bits of paper. This reminded me of a classmates work from last week!

Yulia Brodskaya double-take

I have artistaday.com installed on the iGoogle homepage, so that the first thing I see each day is the artist the site chooses to feature. Probably once or twice a month I love the art so much that it captures my fleeting internet-surfing attention and makes me click. Yulia Brodskaya is an artist discovery that I am so excited to find because of her passion for typography, paper and making things with her hands. Her work is 3-dimensional, eye-catching and incredibly precise.

All images published with consent of Yulia Brodskaya

Gosh I love this one - recycled card (created with recycled cardboard)

Her clients include Starbucks, GQ, Wired, Nokia, and my favorite is this one for New Scientist:

To me the most impressive aspect of Yulia's work is that she graduated with a masters in Visual Communications in 2006 (University of Hertfordshire, England) and has been deeply involved with paper-cut illustrations long before they became the new craze. For designers working in the past decade (or three), it seems like it would have been an uphill battle to get handmade work accepted by clients. Since we may have just concluded this era of everything-shiny-and-new, we should be seeing many more illustrators and designers picking back up the pencil and creating things that remind us of our simple human roots and wholesome values. See all Yulia Brodskaya's work here.