The Sensual Zodiac

An introduction to Entrelacer by El.
My husband jokingly tells me that my form of art that I have christened 'Entrelacer' seems like our fourth child. Maybe he is right. It started out young and without a defined direction. It takes a lot of time and over the last decades it has slowly grown and matured.
The evolution of Entrelacer actually began, as with all of my fellow sisters, at the young age when we start cutting out paper dolls. When I was a child it was my great, great Aunt Lillian Elizabeth (Kapitan) Paulson (1893-1973) who taught me about femininity and beauty and grace. It was her guiding hand that helped my small fingers handle the oversized scissors to cut out the paper forms that adorned my make believe princesses. And if we did not find the exact dress we needed, we made our own from the pictures of all the brilliantly colored fashion magazines that cluttered her small apartment.
My Aunt Lillian might be called a spinster. But she was no shrinking violet. She had no husband or child to define her but rather emitted a bright aura of quiet power and confidence that I would not recognize in her until after her death. Until that time, she was just this elegant force that occupied a favored part of my family dynamics. She taught me a lot.
In my college days I continued cutting and pasting in the form of the traditional collages that were popular then. Eclectic cutouts of paper glued to a board that told the abstract story of our time. And then it fell fallow as my time redirected to being a wife and mother. The decades flew by.
In the late 1990's I rediscovered my passion for cutting paper. I attempted to recapture the style that I started in college so long ago, but I was no longer that dreamy eyed young lady with the whole world ahead of her. I had changed. My attempts to go back to the past produced empty, stilted and sterile forms.
In time I was drawn back to Aunt Lillian and her Edwardian values and standards. I remembered how she seemed to float along the floor in her long gowns of satin with an elegance that had been lost to me for some time. It was that elegance, and the power and strength she exuded as a feminine force of the time that started to guide my hands once again.
I started to cut out beautiful shapes that intrigued me. They started out as random pieces strewn about the board, but then I saw patterns. I saw the patterns evolve into stories of people I knew and expressions of my own emotions and fears and hopes. There was a new energy. There were dynamics of color and saturation and shading that seemed to gather themselves with my hand only aiding in their final placement.
My older style of collage was a staccato patchwork of edged pieces that had definite beginnings and ends, but this new form had no borders, no limitations. This was a flow and blend of colors into a harmonious symphony of depth and passion and beauty. It was not side by side placement of cuttings but rather a weaving of the colors and shapes into a subtle tapestry of emotion. I could not easily describe what this process was. This woven art needed its own name. And in the end, 'Entrelacer', was the name I chose, a French word referring to the act of weaving.