the silhouette artist

For our wedding we’ve commissioned a premiere artist of a very rare art of silhouette cutting. Karl Johnson of Cut Arts will be at our wedding for only 2 hours to cut silhouettes of us and our guests. We’ve really enjoyed and respected this art form since our days working at Disneyland and thought it’d be a great treat to have for our guests.

Taking a snippet of his bio from his website:

Karl learned this unique skill as a young boy from his father who had been taught many years earlier by a long time friend of the family.

Karl took to this unusual art form extremely well.  Something he attributes, in part, to having vision in only one eye.  Karl was born being able to see only from his right eye.  Not having binocular vision forces Karl to judge the distance and shape of an object by examining its shadow.  This allows Karl to capture an image in shadow in an uncanny way.

Recently he was commissioned by Marc Anthony to cut an image of his wife, Jennifer Lopez, for her 40th birthday and also appeared at the party to cut silhouettes for guests.  Karl was also commissioned by the new Hong Kong Disney Park to create all the silhouette portraits to be displayed in the silhouette studio on Main Street.

Starting when he was only ten years old and now forty four, Karl estimates that he has freehand cut hundreds of thousands of silhouette images so far in his career.

We’re so excited to have Karl apart of our celebration that day and hope our guests will arrive on time during cocktail hour to have a silhouette made by such a prestigious artist. He will also be available for an additional hour during dinner to cut images for anyone who was missed during cocktail. I guess if he’s a big enough hit we’ll have to keep him there for an hour longer than we had commissioned.

Here’s a silhouette of Rob and I when we worked at Disneyland together in 1998–12 years ago! As you can see…Rob wore glasses back then. Can’t wait to see what Karl cuts of us that day.

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