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Rosa Leff | |
Artist Gallery |
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| Intricate, detailed paper cuts are artist Rosa Leff’s specialty. Using only one sheet of paper and a knife, she cuts cityscapes out by hand based on original photographs she takes during her worldwide travels. The resulting scenes show her fine dexterity in slicing the paper; they are filled with thin tangles of power lines and intricate brickwork and lettering. She has also experimented with cutting unusual media such as paper plates and paper towels, the former in an imitation of Chinese pottery, and the latter that appear like lace embroidered with words. In this way, Leff takes the traditional folk medium of papercutting and gives it a modern perspective. This art of creating by hand began in her childhood, where she grew up painting alongside her grandmother and watching her father build reproduction antique furniture. As a result, Leff sees no distinction between fine art and craft — what matters to her is that things are made by hand and made well.
Leff was first inspired to hand cut cityscapes when she moved from Philadelphia to Baltimore and felt homesick; in an effort to reconcile those feelings she started papercutting photos she had taken of Philly. Today, Leff will walk around a city, zig zagging through alleys to find the scenes that call to her to photograph. When choosing which photos to turn into papercuts, she’ll lay a photo out for days until she feels the story and connection with it before she begins to cut. She uses a small Fiskars detail knife with a finger loop handle, reversing the positive and negative in her scenes and cutting the lighter spaces out. It’s an abstract process, as she doesn’t know what she’s cutting or what it looks like as a full scene until she’s finished and lifts the paper to see the light pouring through the cuts.
Leff’s cityscapes reflect her travels to places such as South Africa, Cuba, Japan, Aruba, Mexico City, and more. Many of these scenes include restaurants and food stands, reminders of the delicious local foods that Leff tried on her trips. To her, food is comfort and a sense of place. In documenting cityscapes and all that comes with them, Leff asks people to pay attention to the everyday scenes around them that they usually take for granted, and to find the beauty in the mundane.
Leff has risen to prominence in the papercut field, serving on the board of The Guild of American Papercutters, and she is also a member of The Paper Artist Collective. She has exhibited in the United States and China, and her papercuts are in the permanent collections of The Colored Girls Museum, The Museum of International Folk Art, and the Canton Museum of Art. She was the recipient of the 2021 Maryland State Arts Council Independent Artist Award, the 2021 Municipal Art Society of Baltimore City Artist Travel Prize, and the 2023 360 Xochi Quetzal BIPOC Residency.
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