Painting With Scissors: The Cut-out

For one of my recent projects, I used cut-out elements for the primary design direction. Upon doing some research into the world of the cut-out, I found some pretty amazing and inspiring artwork out there. Henri Matisse called it “painting with scissors”.

On the one hand, the cut-out brings to mind images of eight-year-olds working diligently in their elementary school art class (at least for me it did at first). But on the other is a fascinating form of expression. Cut-outs, by their nature alone, are rough and edgy. Even the elegant paper plants of Yuko Yamamoto still have a certain unpolished feeling to them.

Artwork utilizing the cut-out comes loaded with attitude and raw emotion. Check out this sampling and you’ll see what I mean.