Intricate ornaments and masks - origami by an American artist

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Joel Cooper is an amazingly talented master. He creates stunning masks and complex geometric shapes from paper using the ancient origami technique. It seems as if the artist used a whole arsenal of materials, although in reality only colored paper was used.

Joel alternates between sheets of bright and muted shades, which gives the figures an additional visual dimension. Sometimes Cooper's wife, a professional artist, takes part in the decoration of the works. Now the Cooper family lives in Kansas and has their own shop with the uncomplicated name "Origami Joel".

It so happened that Joel got acquainted with the art of origami quite early. The artist recalls that in his childhood, which fell on the 70s, his parents bought the twenty-four volumes "The family creative workshop" - a kind of manual on a wide variety of crafts. “Then I was very interested in the eleventh volume entitled“Figures from papier-mâché”. Apparently, this was the very turning point,”the artist recalls. The boy was so shocked by what he saw that he irresistibly wanted to master the difficult technique and make all the figures presented in the book with his own hands.

“I have always liked the most complex models,” says the artist. “The most interesting thing about origami is geometry. Since I myself began to invent new shapes and forms, books with instructions have faded into the background. Perhaps also because as a child I read so many of them. However, I cannot but mention the book "Creative Origami" by Kunihiko Kasahara. The book is structured very competently - from simple figures to more complex ones. Probably, this is exactly the book with which you should start acquaintance with this craft. Detailed instructions should be of great help to a newbie,”says Cooper.

Cooper formulates his approach to the art of origami as follows: “For me, origami is a kind of compromise between the flight of engineering thought and pure aesthetics. My task is to make the origami figurine as attractive as possible, because sometimes correctly folded origami is like a perfect mathematical equation! For those who are just starting their journey in the art of origami, I would recommend starting with the simplest shapes, be patient and take your time."

Another artist Nguyen Hung Cuong, like his colleague Joel Cooper, knows a lot about the art of creating masterpieces from plain paper. Vietnamese Nguyen Hung Cuong is a renowned master of animal figurines.