origamijoel

   The time has flown by. I have been folding, but I have been delinquent in posting the results of my paper manipulations. I still have trouble showing work that is unfinished or not finished to my satisfaction. I’ve always been like that, which is why I worked in the dark, so to speak, for so long.

   I have been struggling with grids on a horizontal alignment (which may not make sense to most people). Compare the grid underlying this recent mask:   

   with this older design:

   Perhaps you can see that the one set of lines in the latter grid is parallel to the vertical axis of the face, and in the former, a set is perpendicular to the vertical. The grid is merely rotated 30 degrees, but the new orientation has many unexpected consequences on the way the face is formed. I have had to rethink almost all of the techniques for face shaping that I had developed on a vertical grid when working on a horizontal. And I’ve worn out a lot of paper trying, with few satisfactory results. But I think the challenge has kept me from getting stale.

   That first mask, “Pharaoh”, by the way, will hopefully be arriving in Croatia soon, for an origami exhibition at the Krapina Gallery. They are showing origami this year as part of their annual Haiku Festival.

   Many more pieces are currently on display closer to home (closer to my home anyway) at the county courthouse in beautiful downtown Lawrence, Kansas. Two walls in the treasurers office have been dedicated to the display of artwork by a different local artist every month. This month (May) is mine.

    Here’s one wall:

   and here’s the other:

   More images of the individual pieces can be seen as a set on flickr.

   My humble blog has just been linked by PolymerClayNotes - as one might expect, a site specializing in things polymer clayish, but also highlighting arts of other media. You should go there right now and have a look around. You are bound to find something to make you want to get up and create something. Thank you, Susan, for sending a little attention my way.

   The attention serves also to remind me that I haven’t posted here in a while, an embarassingly long while. My apologies for that. I have been folding, I assure you. I have in fact been experimenting with some new techniques that have been slow to bear fruit, but nonetheless will not let me go. I can be frustratingly single-minded that way. It’s entirely possibly that when I’ve finally finished something, it will succeed only in eliciting an unequivocal “meh…” but until I have a solution of some kind, good or bad, I can’t let it go.

But the purpose of this blog was to chronicle my work, and I should be doing that. So I promise to post soon about what I’ve been doing, and you can judge for yourself. If nothing else, my struggles may illuminate someone else’s. Possibly give some ideas, who knows. I hope so.

“Ultimate” as in “the last one” ….. probably.

While putting work up for sale on eBay has been a good way to make  it available to anyone who would like to obtain a “Joel Cooper Original”, and the lucky bidders who have done so seem to be happy with their acquisitions - I still prefer venues where the pieces can be seen, held, touched and thoroughly examined by as many people as possible. Art fairs, conventions, maybe even a gallery or two (although most galleries frown on patrons touching the artwork, which is really not fair at all)

   That said, I’ve put one last mask on eBay for anyone who just has to have one-

See a gigantic image of it here - and a link to the eBay sale here

 I think it’s pretty special - it was originally folded in Brazil for the first International Origami Tessellation Exhibition there, itself a rather special event (in many ways). At about 37 cm. tall it’s the largest mask I’ve ever done or will likely ever do (I had to wrestle a 100 cm. piece of Wyndstone Marble to fold this thing - not fun). You can see, it has acquired a coat of shellac like the mask in Israel from an earlier post, which gives it some nice character, as well as strengthening and protecting the paper.

Well, that’s a bit harsh - I’m just trying to support my folding habit is all. So I’ve got a few things on eBay. If you’ve ever considered collecting some unusual, original artwork (great conversation pieces and you can be pretty sure your neighbors don’t have one already) put a bid in on one of these. This auction closes soon, so don’t dawdle.

Sending my children out into the great big world out there.

 This world-weary fellow is currently residing in Israel, soon to be a part of an international origami exhibition at the Tikotin Museum in Haifa, due to begin this summer. Some information about the Museum of Japanese Art in Israel can be found here. Saadya Sternberg, the acting curator for the show, assures me that origamists of renown from all over the world will be participating, so if you should find yourself Haifa this summer, why not drop on by!

   The piece is similar to earlier designs, more or less a cross between Moses and a mask I had simply named “Another Bearded Fellow”, apparently whilst in a funk of creative malaise. This new mask is distinguished by a coating of shellac, which is a treatment I’ve been experimenting with for a while, but only now have I started to get it right. It gives the piece a look of old varnished wood, and stiffens the paper and protects it from the elements as well.

 This model may be easily recognized as a variation of the Triplet, with one face less. The original Triplet was inspired by a suggestion from Eric Gjerde and a three-faced sculpture he had seen. The two-faced variation, Gemini, was suggested by my better half, who has an aversion to odd numbers (the name, however, was my idea, so don’t blame her for that). It would seem I am highly suggestible. I should consider myself lucky that she didn’t suggest four faces to keep the number even (Mount Rushmore in paper? hmmmm….).

      This mask is in Massachusetts right now, being prepared for inclusion in the Origami Now! show at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, beginning this summer. Take a look at their press release and you’ll see that lots of really wonderful artists will be represented there. Go check this one out, it should be a great show. I would go myself, but I have still more irons in the fire.

    In addition to this year’s Origami USA convention in New York, which I hope against hope to be able to attend - so many good friends to see there - I’ll be helping out with the local Islamic Society of Lawrence’s youth camp for a day, elaborating on the influence of traditional Islamic arts in the seemingly disparate art of origami, re: tessellations. But mostly I’ll be showing little ones how to fold paper and have fun.

    And I’ve been invited to participate in the annual Origami Festival at Tansu in Houston, which looks to be a great time for all, with demonstrations, workshops and all that. It is also a charitable event for the Sunshine Kids Foundation, a Houston based organization providing positive activities for children undergoing cancer treatment. The kids will be at the festival and they will be folding. Should be a blast!

    It began as something else (as is often the case - see previous post), but as folding progressed, a distinct character other than that intended began to emerge. To me, it looks like an ill-tempered dwarf, perhaps one who’s magic ring has just been stolen by some Rhenish pipsqueak with a fancy sword. I could call this one “Alberich”-  or I could go with another surly dwarf in another story about a magic ring, and call him “Gimli”. I wouldn’t want anyone to think I would actually sit through fifteen hours of Wagnerian bombast to get my inspiration, so maybe I’ll go with Gimli on this one.

Shrewd observers might notice the similarities in this design to the previous post, “Mephistopheles”, especially around the mouth and mustache.  Gimli here did evolve directly from Meffy, which was done primarily as a beard study to solve some technical challenges with integrating a full beard with a simple mouth.  A lot of pleats to coordinate; the origamic equivalent of corraling cats. I try to make it seem as if I am completely in control of the paper when I fold these things, but that is not at all the case. Just making a nose or an eye is easy. Much of the work in designing these things is figuring out how in heck do you get all folds that come from these seperate elements to work together when you put a nose and two eyes and a mouth, etc., in close proximity to each other. At some point, I’m not telling the paper what to do anymore - it’s telling me. But that’s really the fun part. I’m not the only creator involved; the paper is there too, and when it works, it works because we are working together. That’s fun!

Further beard studies along the same basic design as Gimli led to his close cousin, whom I have called the “Green Man”.

Although it has been suggested (Thank you, Christiane), and it is consistent with the unofficial Tolkien theme herein, that he may be an Ent. I don’t know the names of any Ents, so I still don’t know what to call him (I’ll confess that I’ve never read Lord of the Rings - while I’m at it, I’ll confess that I’ve never sat for more than a few minutes of the Nibelungenlied either, but that doesn’t stop me from naming the other mask “Alberich”, as if I know what the heck I’m talking about).

   The eyes, nose and mustache are basically the same, but I’ve called in a tessellation pattern of hex twists and opened iso-hex twists to act as beard. Don’t worry if the above description makes no sense, I don’t know any good descriptive terms for the techniques used to make that tessellation; that may have to be the subject for a future tutorial on this blog.

   The Green Man, by the way, is currently on the virtual auction block at eBay. Do a search for “origami mask” and you’ll find it. You’ll also find a little glassine mask, images of which may be seen on my Flickr site as well. Keep watching eBay and you will find more of my pieces becoming available in the near future. I had been preparing in the last couple of months for a local annual art show, which last year provided an unexpected but very timely source of exposure and income. This year’s show was cancelled due to thunderstorms (an outdoor event in Kansas, in May, and no provisions for inclement weather - go figure). Oh, well. The northeast Kansas origami artwork collectors’ loss (a niche market, to be sure) is the world wide origami artwork collectors’ gain (you could say that I’m bumping it up a niche). The pieces that I prepared for sale locally (complete with protective polyurethane coating against the possibility of rain) will be made available globally. Long live the internet!

This is a mask that I’m working on currently. I usually don’t post works in progress, but I thought I would record this one for posterity, as I think there are some interesting and new things going on in it’s developement, and the way I work, they may be lost forever in the final product. So this stage has been recorded for posterity.

I was otiginally trying to do something quite different, another bearded gentlemen - Zeus - but as I worked the mouth and beard, a smile appeared (in the mask, that is). My Zeus was supposed to be grimacing menacingly, but this fellow was smiling, and I could do nothing to wipe that self-satisfied smirk from his face; so I went with it.

The rest of the mask took shape of it’s own volition and the mighty Zeus faded away as the impish Pan took his place. Or if you prefer - Mephistopheles.

This “swirly” tessellation was created a while back as an adaptation of Tomoko Fuse’s swirly square tessellation (seen here folded by Melisande) applied to a hexagon and triangle tessellation pattern

Begin with a regular hexagonal twist, but use pleats three creases wide - resist the urge to make a three crease wide hexagon, keep the little hexagon sitting on top - twist that little hexagon back in the direction opposite to the way the big pleats want to go, and then begin to collapse the whole thing into a sort of star shape. Notice in the second picture where the twisting begins to reverse direction at the base of the forming star.

When the star has collapsed, begin to twist the hexagon on top back again to form the swirls. This is a pretty messy move, but I don’t know any better way to do it. Start with one pleat, fold it back, move to the next exposed pleat, fold it back, and work your way around the hexagon until you have enough slack to twist it and lay it flat (the pleats themselves will not lay flat).

The tessellation contiues by “splitting”or bifurcating the pleats that leave the hex swirl to make triangular twists all around it. Remember, the pleats are three creases wide, so they should be split into two pleats that are also three creases wide. Notice where the splits occur. The triangle twists are done similarly to the swirled hexagonal twists; the twists are not collapsed as simple triangles, but as triangular stars with a smaller triangle on top. The little triangle on top is then twisted back, just as the hexagons were, to make the swirls.

Each pleat around the central hexagon is split with a triangle swirl, and then new hexagon swirls can be formed where the new pleats intersect to make a complete tessellation pattern.

The original images for this tutorial can be seen here. Pictures on flickr can be viewed larger than they are presented here.

   It begins with an open-backed hex-twist (if you don’t know how to make an open-backed hex twist… well…. learn how) - bifurcate of the pleats on the back to produce a triangle twist as close to the hex twist as you can
 begin to split the next pleat (it starts to get tricky, and the paper will not lay flat, it will even try to resist your efforts at this point) to begin to form another open-backed hex twist on the other side
continue the process going from on side of the paper to the other, splitting pleats to make triangle twists and adding pleats to make hex twists
and there ya go

 A fragment of a small mask folded from a single piece of baking parchment. No cuts or glue were used.