Artist StatemenT

David Friedman - FriedArt Studio, Portland, Oregon

I studied Art and Painting at the University of Illinois. After graduating, I moved to New York and continued my career as an artist. In 1993 I moved to Portland, Oregon and experimented in a variety of media. I started to do a large series of scratchboard pieces that eventually led me to trying out papercutting as an exercise in having more control of lines. Using both traditional papercutting techniques along with reflective color optics, I emphasize the dimensionality of paper by hand cutting the paper using scalpels and x-acto knives and then mounting the papercuts using mini-stilts that I create. Color is laminated on the back of black paper so that the color reflects upon the museum board that the stilted papercuts are mounted to. My work in paper began by taking my original designs and cutting them out in black paper but soon I started creating multiple level pieces with many colors. My newest work uses the reflective optics of color paper to create color "shadows" that look like the pieces have been airbrushed behind the paper...but it is solely light. Creating pieces that mix those colors together in multiple layers of paper and color is the most recent direction of my work. Papercutting has been a traditional craft in Chinese, Japanese, German and Jewish cultures. Today it has become an artform with an impressive variety of imaginative works.

• Founding board member of Portland Open Studios.

• Current board member of Art In The Pearl.