Our featured artist for January is Elisabeth Hyder, owner of Brookfield PaperWorks. Please stop by any time this month to view her work on display, or join us for the opening reception on Thursday, January 7 at 6:30 pm. All are welcome and light refreshments will be served.

"Working with colors and patterns gives me great satisfaction. To see an idea take form from head to hand to paper is a new delight each time I do it. I love the freedom this wet-pigment process gives me. Colors blend, line up, overlap, cross each other, patterns suddenly show a three-dimensional structure, a design starts to flow. When one paper is finished and the next started, there is often a continuity, a new idea begging to come out.

It is a great privilege to be able to vary my work. I am happiest when each new paper is a different design or uses different colors. Although I have done dozens or even scores of the same pattern (as for an edition of books), I only start purring when my papers differ from each other.

When my day's work of papers is done, I set them aside for various later projects. For my collages I spend a lot of time finding just the right color shade or pattern for its parts. I also find pleasure in coming up with new forms or shapes made with my papers: little pyramids hung from a string, an zigzag-folded album with a variety of paste paper squares, cut-out letters of different colors and patterns.

Like many artists before me, I am glad to find that color and pattern offer endless variations, and together they border on an infinity of possibilities."