By Geoff Carter
To many artists, a blank sheet of paper represents a beginning, but to Jeffrey Nishinaka, it’s a means to an end. This inventive Los Angeles-based talent takes sheets of artist-grade paper, then cuts, folds and shapes them into multidimensional paper sculptures whose properties defy easy description, unless you drop the word “magic” in there somewhere.
“The way that things are in the foreground, middle ground and off in the distance … I see the world that way,” Nishinaka says. “I try to see things through my mind’s eye. If I look down this street to the intersection of another street, I can see the perspective — and I think, ‘That might make a really interesting sculpture.’”
“Interesting” doesn’t quite capture it. Think of a 3-D movie, with its overlapping planes and receding horizon, then remove all the color, leaving only texture and shadow. Through Nishinaka’s eye, the whole of our world is transformed into the shapes we once saw in clouds when we were young. This cloud looks like a city with gently bowing skyscrapers; that cloud looks like a dragon.
You’d expect Nishinaka to be boastful — it isn’t everyone who can see into other worlds or count Jackie Chan among his most devoted collectors — but he couldn’t be more humble. He sees paper sculpting as something he more or less fell into “back in [his] art school days.”
“It was quite by accident, but I seemed to take to it,” he says. “I was not really aware that there weren’t that many of us doing paper sculpture when I started, and later I was told that I was the first serious paper sculptor to come around in seven years. There still aren’t that many of us doing it.”
One need only examine Nishinaka’s methods to understand why there aren’t many paper sculptors around. His pieces take days, if not weeks, of close, patient work — there’s lots of shaping, folding, cutting and gluing to do. And, of course, there’s the matter of seeing the world in shapes you can cut out with an X-Acto blade.
“Individually, the shapes look like a bunch of mismatched puzzle pieces,” Nishinaka says. “I make the shapes a little bit more organic. I try to curve things. Even if a building is straight, I play with the perspective to make things more animated-looking.”
As it turns out, artists who play with perspective are exactly what we’ve been looking for.
Nishinaka was asked to create two pieces for Fresh Perspectives, on the themes of challenge and empower. The latter theme came easy: To Nishinaka, there’s nothing more powerful than a dragon. “The dragon seems to be the king of all those other mythological creatures,” he says.
Expressing challenge, however, proved a bit of an uphill climb.
“I did this building that’s basically on the top of a cliff, overlooking the ocean with a big sun coming up,” he says. “To me, it’s always a challenge to work yourself up to the top of it, and it’s also a challenge to stay up there. Once you’re up on top, there are people and circumstances that try to knock you off.”
And Nishinaka wouldn’t have it any other way.
“If I ever think, ‘OK, this is it, I’ve created the ultimate sculpture,’ then I really should retire, because that means I’m dead,” he says. “I hope to feel challenged for the rest of my life.”
To many artists, a blank sheet of paper represents a beginning, but to Jeffrey Nishinaka, it’s a means to an end. This inventive Los Angeles-based talent takes sheets of artist-grade paper, then cuts, folds and shapes them into multidimensional paper sculptures whose properties defy easy description, unless you drop the word “magic” in there somewhere.
“The way that things are in the foreground, middle ground and off in the distance … I see the world that way,” Nishinaka says. “I try to see things through my mind’s eye. If I look down this street to the intersection of another street, I can see the perspective — and I think, ‘That might make a really interesting sculpture.’”
“Interesting” doesn’t quite capture it. Think of a 3-D movie, with its overlapping planes and receding horizon, then remove all the color, leaving only texture and shadow. Through Nishinaka’s eye, the whole of our world is transformed into the shapes we once saw in clouds when we were young. This cloud looks like a city with gently bowing skyscrapers; that cloud looks like a dragon.
You’d expect Nishinaka to be boastful — it isn’t everyone who can see into other worlds or count Jackie Chan among his most devoted collectors — but he couldn’t be more humble. He sees paper sculpting as something he more or less fell into “back in [his] art school days.”
“It was quite by accident, but I seemed to take to it,” he says. “I was not really aware that there weren’t that many of us doing paper sculpture when I started, and later I was told that I was the first serious paper sculptor to come around in seven years. There still aren’t that many of us doing it.”
One need only examine Nishinaka’s methods to understand why there aren’t many paper sculptors around. His pieces take days, if not weeks, of close, patient work — there’s lots of shaping, folding, cutting and gluing to do. And, of course, there’s the matter of seeing the world in shapes you can cut out with an X-Acto blade.
“Individually, the shapes look like a bunch of mismatched puzzle pieces,” Nishinaka says. “I make the shapes a little bit more organic. I try to curve things. Even if a building is straight, I play with the perspective to make things more animated-looking.”
As it turns out, artists who play with perspective are exactly what we’ve been looking for.
Nishinaka was asked to create two pieces for Fresh Perspectives, on the themes of challenge and empower. The latter theme came easy: To Nishinaka, there’s nothing more powerful than a dragon. “The dragon seems to be the king of all those other mythological creatures,” he says.
Expressing challenge, however, proved a bit of an uphill climb.
“I did this building that’s basically on the top of a cliff, overlooking the ocean with a big sun coming up,” he says. “To me, it’s always a challenge to work yourself up to the top of it, and it’s also a challenge to stay up there. Once you’re up on top, there are people and circumstances that try to knock you off.”
And Nishinaka wouldn’t have it any other way.
“If I ever think, ‘OK, this is it, I’ve created the ultimate sculpture,’ then I really should retire, because that means I’m dead,” he says. “I hope to feel challenged for the rest of my life.”
