Last week, Sawy Culture Wheel’s Word Hall was host to art of a different dimension: découpage, a technique where layer upon layer of cut-outs are glued together. Raised under a glass, the cut-outs look like paintings accentuated with a three-dimensional effect. Amany Zakaria Hamed showcased this technique through 42 paintings in her collection entitled “Découpage.
Découpage, also known as “poor man’s art, often employs household objects and paper cut-outs for artistic effect. Several layers of paper or objects are glued together and covered over with varnish to produce the effect of a painting. Also known as the art of Japanning, the technique was originally used on furniture. Developed in England in the 17th century, this art form gained popularity and came to be known in France as découpage from the French “découper – to cut out.
Hamed told Daily News Egypt that she works on both previously made paintings and cut-outs of pictures with her découpage technique. In the landscapes, the artist inserts real dried flowers amid the paper shrubbery, providing something for the eyes to linger on.
With a few landscapes, however, the majority of Hamed’s collection focuses on portraits of craftsmen.
It is people that literally stand out in these paintings. Hamed said she glued four cut-out photos on top of each other in her découpage series. The effect produced is one of lending folds to the clothes of the figure depicted.
Glue or varnish is used to gloss over each layer producing the effect of a painting. Hamed also pays careful attention to the wares of the subjects. Thin cut-out strips meet the hands of a woman weaving the straw into the basket. In another painting, small cut-out straws that look like bamboo sticks flank a woman weaving another basket.
The setting in which the figure is depicted is highlighted by the three dimensional technique. Other portraits show women posing beside their raised pottery, a man making the khayamiyya (tent cloth), and another carrying bread. Their profession, it seems, is given as much weight as their person.
Similar little details add dimension to otherwise flat paintings. Small pieces of metal and plastic perform the role of accessories, acting as necklaces, baubles or earrings.
However, in pictures of crowds, objects chosen for the foreground appear arbitrarily selected. The chosen orientalist pieces of snake-charmers or markets, where all persons are foregrounded using the découpage technique, hold little charm or attention. The powerful focus in the former pictures of craftspersons is lost amid the crowded market scenes, where tapestries hang flatly, or beds lie on one plane with the reclining body floating out of the image.
Pictures of Pharaonic scenes similarly invite little interest. The finery of Pharaonic subjects is given little attention. The further they are in time – medieval and Pharaonic images – the flatter their features.
Only in the depictions of the more recent craftspersons acting upon their craft does Hamed pay careful attention to both the subject and their objects, creating a balance between the two.
Interestingly, in Hamed’s depiction of these craftsmen, the medium and the subject of the “poor man’s craft thereby find a curious congruity.
