Matisse & Me

A few days ago I posted to Instagram/Facebook the photo above and the following explanation of why I cut hearts.  "Often times people ask me how I got started cutting and pinning paper hearts. This is a photo from my very first attempt in January 2015. I was in Colorado and flipping through a local magazine marveling at the pretty colors and wondering what I could do with them. So cutting it into hearts seemed the logical thing to do. Then what?!? Pin them onto a board!"  
Today I came across this article on Matisse and I found it rather interesting....  He loved cutting paper too!   Here's what the article on MOMA's website had to say:  Why, in the last decade of his career, did Henri Matisse turn to creating with scissors and painted paper? Though the medium was a new invention, its development was a logical outgrowth of key ideas that defined Matisse’s lifelong artistic practice.
The Red Studio. Fall 1911COLOR AND LINEThroughout his career, Matisse searched for a way to unite the formal elements of color and line. On the one hand, he was known as a master colorist: from the non-realistic palette that earned him the designation of a fauve or “wild beast” in the first decade of the twentieth century, to the light-infused interiors of his so-called “Nice period” of the 1920s, he followed a course of what he described as “construction by means of color.” On the other hand, he was a master draftsman, celebrated for drawings and prints that describe a figure in fluid arabesque lines; “my line drawing is the purest and most direct translation of my emotion,” he once said. Through the cut-outs, he was finally able to unite these two branches of his practice. He described the process of making them as both “cutting directly into color” and “drawing with scissors.”
Okay his explanation is way cooler than mine.  But, I think this may be why I am so drawn to his work.   Below is a photo of him in his studio and click here to read the whole article.   I'd love to know if you like his cut outs too!