Joisel was born on
November 15, 1956, in Montmorency, Val-d'Oise, a commune in the northern
suburbs of Paris, and focused his education on history and law before turning
to art. His initial experiences with art who not with origami however, they
were with sculpting. Eric Joisel first discovered in the 1980s the unique forms
created with paper by Akira Yoshizawa. This is important because Akira is
considered the grandmaster of origami and supposeduly created 50,000 pieces. In
the process of making all of these he came up with some of the popular
techniques that Joisel would use in his own work. But in the 1990’s Joisel
changed what he was working on and started devoting the remainder of his career
to creating origami art using his own self-taught variation of the wet-folding
techniques that Yoshizawa had developed and refined. Before he was seriously
into origami he worked as a printer, but he proceeded to take up a career in
origami because he was fired. He lived in a small house and spent anywhere from
hours to years in the planning process.
With some pieces he
would spend a year plus in the planning stages but the actual execution of the
design could be done within a period of days or weeks. This planning process
sounds very long at first, but some of his art would have hundreds of precisely
planned folds. Also, the pieces themselves could be as big as 15 feet by 25
feet. But for the most part his art was no bigger than 12 inches and a lot of
it was the size of an average hand. Art lovers have been willing to pay
thousands for his artwork, but the high amount of time spent on each piece
calls for a very low income. Joisel published many of the design plans for his
figures, providing a look into the extraordinary level of detail and precision
that "renders his art simultaneously approachable and unattainable".
In his obituary, The New York Times included instructions on how to duplicate
one of Joisel's figures of a rat, though it noted that "no lay person
should even contemplate the hedgehog".
Joisel was featured in the documentary Between the Folds, a 2009 film by
Vanessa Gould about the modern world of origami artists. A resident of Sannois,
Joisel died at the age of 53 on October 10, 2010, in Argenteuil due to lung
cancer. He had never married and had no children, and was survived by four
siblings
Work
Cited:
"Eric Joisel." Wikipedia. Wikimedia
Foundation, 04 Aug. 2014. Web. 11 Apr. 2014.
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