Staircase

I recently bought a book on paper art, "Paper Cutting", and these pieces by the American artist Patricia Zapata caught my eye:

I was attracted by the clean lines and simple (though not simplistic) designs so I unashamedly decided to reproduce 'Hold On' (the girl on the swing) and 'Hiding' (Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf). Copying a piece using a new style gives a feel for the challenges, particularly in how the designs might be constrained by the technique which involves multiple layers. These investigative pieces are always just for myself and never intended for distribution or sale.

Having completed these, I wanted to move into my own design, and, having recently completed a remodelling of our staircase (which challenged my woodworking skills to the utmost), I thought I would use the clean white lines of this as the basis for the design. The result, 'Staircase', uses a scale model of the stairs and I decided to have Little Red Riding Hood (from 'Hiding') climbing the stairs to our bedroom area unaware of the wolf that has slunk on ahead. The woodsman is unhelpfully heading away into our living room carrying his axe. [There are other possible interpretations. It may well be that LRRH has just broken up with the woodsman and is knowingly following the wolf up to our bedroom.]

Getting this design correct with the implied infinite progression literally gave me headaches. If we zoom in to the right-hand picture, ringed in black, we get:

Again, zooming into the ringed section we get:

As you can see from the above, the next depth down produces a 3x4 pixel image!

The pictures hang on the wall in a close approximation to that represented by the 'Staircase' picture. Just out of shot to the top left of 'Hiding' is my version of 'Hold On'. For consistency, I used the same coloured background for each picture.

January 2022