Origami For Kids

Added 14 March, 2012. All of you thousands of sudden visitors to my site, who came here today via the "Google doodle" or by Google-imaging "Akira Yoshizawa"---I am immensely flattered, but am just a humble student of the late great master. If you like this "Head", you might like to know that the sculpture was shown during a talk at the fabulous Yoshizawa animal origami exhibit at the SieboldHuis JapanMuseum in Leiden, the Netherlands, last year, where I was invited to speak. A few Yoshizawa images from that exhibit may be viewed here . (It's what you came for after all... ) Poke around my blog if you want to see what modern paperfolding art looks like---at least my modern paperfolding art. Your appreciation of origami, warms the heart. --Saadya ---------------- ORIGINAL POST (January 2011) Head , by Saadya Made for Jaron Borensztajn of Amsterdam, collector and grandson of Felix Tikotin, the great Japanese Art collector and dealer who...

Last week I had a communication out of the blue from Stephan Weber , first by email then by Skype. Stephan had recently gone back to doing human heads (“masks”) and must have been pointed to my site, where he found a lot of similarity of intent with what I've been doing. I first encountered Weber at “Masters of Origami” in Salzburg, 2005, a show put together by the Red Bull corporation. That was a landmark exhibit, full of first-rate origami some of which was also high art indeed—but Stephan's pair of giant, almost snorting red bulls, struck me as that exhibition's focal point. Immense, vigorous, detailed, absolute icons of latent power, I could not take my eyes off them. Stephan tells me he was tasked by Red Bull to make them about a week before the show opened, and complied. Stephan divides his time between Germany (was it Cologne?) and Patagonia, Chile. What he does in Chile I don't know, except that he likes to go fishing and is rebuilding after a hostel he owned wa...

In origami it is the smooth surface and clean initial shape that I love, out of which erupts 3D form and line and texture, catching the eye at every instant. This eruption out of purity and simplicity, and the retention of it for as long as possible, or the transformation of it into other, reduced forms as the development progresses, is what I like in the work of the best origami designers, those few who know the true cost of complexity. But it is a characteristic also of some of the most beautiful shapes in nature, those of many birds, for example; or flowers, which retain an innocence or a cleanness of line even as their parts differentiate and complexify and turn into the sophisticated instruments of attraction that they must necessarily be. So it is with special interest that I am following the career of one particular designer—not of origami, but of haute couture —whose work has some of this very innocence and sophistication of the floral bloom, its fragility and its might, its or...