Polish Paper Cutting

525 Words3 Pages
In my essay I will be talking about the art of Polish paper cutting, or “Wycinanki”, and how I drew inspiration from it to make my 2-D independent project. Even though my project was a 2-D drawing, I used the colors and techniques from the paper cuts found in the Łowicz region of Poland, which is typically the form where lots of different colors are used. Magdalena Nowacka-Jannotta is the artist whose art I used to draw inspiration from, she is a modern day paper cutter who was born in Poland. Magdalena Nowacka-Jannotta is from Warsaw, Poland and she was born before the second World War. She is currently alive. She creates very colorful Wycinanki using the traditional sheep shears. She is not known for any work in particular, yet she takes inspiration from “her mother who embroidered textiles with colorful, exotic flowers”. The medium of art that Nowacka-Jannotta does is like any traditional Polish paper cutting, as I said she uses colorful paper or textiles and cuts patterns using her sheep shears. See below an example from her work. The medium of this artwork is paper cutting that pasted onto a canvas. The title, dimensions and date created are not available on the Internet, all I can find is that it was done by Nowacka-Jannotta. The subject is flowers and what seem to be feathers. Flowers are a very popular symbol in Wycinanki, along with chickens, peacocks and trees. It expresses a landscape and the colors of flowers during spring or summer; in Poland, each element of the art represents something. For example, flowers represent giving, birds represent “free spirit and freedom”, and a circle represents “perfection with no beginning”. The art element used the most seems to be color, as with the brightness of the pinks, greens and blues. Though Nowacka-Jannotta’s work isn’t completely original seeing as she drew inspiration from many generations of Polish
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