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Think back to the first time you saw a Cirque du Soleil performance. Remember how it made you rethink what it is to be a circus? Beth White’s astonishingly intricate silhouettes are doing the same thing for the centuries-old practice of paper cutting. She is redefining the art. |
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Historically considered a poor cousin to photography and portraiture, silhouettes—the name comes from Etienne de Silhouette, the miserly finance minister under Louis XV—once provided an affordable alternative to those more-expensive art forms. And the stereotypical image many have of a silhouette (also called scherenschnitte in German) is the child’s profile hanging in an oval frame on Grandmother’s bedroom wall. |
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"What I do is take a black piece of paper, and I draw the image I want on the back. And then I cut away what I don’t want,” she said, even as the pieces hanging around her on the walls of her Sylvan Park condominium bespeak a more complex origin. What White really does is render beautiful, sophisticated images using elaborate patterns that she painstakingly cuts away using a No. 11 X-Acto knife while wearing jeweler’s glasses. The result is art with a wow factor, which has appeared on album covers, book jackets, her own line of greeting cards, and in private collections around the world. |
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Perhaps in homage to the heyday of silhouettes in the nineteenth century, many of White’s pieces have a wistful, yesteryear quality to them. “That’s my favorite period,” said White, a Maryland native who came to Nashville in 1973 after graduating from Tulane. “I like the ‘40s, and I did some ‘50s work, and I’ve done modern silhouettes too, but I don’t like them as much. They don’t have the charm. The nineteenth century was a charming era,” she said. |
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Recurrent motifs in White’s work, particularly in her earlier pieces, include women, cats, and open windows with curtains wafting in a gentle breeze. “The windows started as a way to layer things; then you have to put somebody in front of them, and women are more fun to do than men. They’re more sensual, and they have more curves; they have more things—physical features, clothing—that you can work with in silhouette. And cats have a sensual thing to them that I really like.” |
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Submitted by: Jackie D.
