Just like the Donovan song implies, to catch the wind was no easy task for local artist Ryan Carroll while completing a piece centered on Morro Rock.
“I was trying to capture that Morro Bay is very windy,” Carroll said with a laugh.
As a papercut artist, Carroll enjoys re-creating imagery from reference photos and other resources, transforming them into intricate, collage-esque artworks that often feel both flat and three-dimensional simultaneously. Unlike how he creates most of his work though, Carroll used a tearing technique rather than a cutting method while creating his Morro Rock scene.
“That was the first tearing one that I played with—to tear the paper instead of cutting it, which was more difficult than I imagined,” said Carroll, whose windy Morro Bay seascape is full of choppy waves—well depicted by the torn pieces of colored paper he used to create them.
The Morro Rock piece is currently on display at Shepard Hall—the Santa Maria Public Library’s gallery space—as part of a new solo exhibition of papercut artworks by Carroll. The showcase opened in mid-March and is scheduled to remain on display through mid-May.
Carroll described the exhibit—which marks the Lompoc artist’s first time displaying his work in Santa Maria—as “basically a summary of all of my work,” as the show includes recent pieces finished within the past few months and a handful with various year gaps in between completion dates.
“I’ve been doing paper stuff for as long as I can remember,” said Carroll, who loved origami in elementary school and became interested in kirigami—in which paper is cut and folded to create three-dimensional designs—during high school.
“I made this 3D model based on Howl’s Moving Castle, from a template I found online. That was my first venture into cutting paper,” recalled Carroll, who went on to study chemical biology at UC Berkeley after high school.
His passions for science and art have always gone hand in hand, said Carroll, who now works as a full time chemist at Vandenberg Space Force Base. Some of his papercut works in the show are protein structures, similar to the models he was assigned to illustrate during college.
“In school, we had to map different proteins, and they get visualized in this sort of ribbon structure,” Carroll said, “and I thought, ‘Oh this looks like a neat abstract,’ but it’s not an abstract—it’s an actual thing.”
“I think there’s a lot more overlap with science and art than people realize,” Carroll added. “I think a lot of people think of art as kind of carefree—like there’s no work involved, but there actually is a lot of work involved.”
Carroll said he’s a big fan of STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics), distinct from the STEM approach.
“Curiosity, ingenuity, and problem solving all both apply to the fields of science and art,” the artist and chemist said. “They’re both very active-minded things.”
The day that Carroll hung his papercut pieces for the new exhibit at Shepard Hall was just the day after his wife, Cristina Kartsioukas, took down her paintings and prints, which were part of the gallery’s first solo exhibit of 2023.
“It happened to be a coincidence that our shows were back-to-back because we applied separately, and she hadn’t changed her name yet. So whoever scheduled us didn’t realize we were married,” Carroll said.
Carroll described the setup process for his exhibit as a race against the clock, as he started hanging his works around 10 a.m. on March 9, knowing he had to catch a flight that evening to Las Vegas—fortunately from the Santa Maria Airport—to attend a weekend-long family reunion and board game convention.
“It was a time crunch for sure,” Carroll said.
Arts Editor Caleb Wiseblood wants to play Monopoly with real money. Place your bets at cwiseblood@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Mar 23-30, 2023.