Katrina Benneck

Katrina Benneck is a scherenschnitt artist, which is the German traditional art form of cutting intricate designs in paper. She began cutting as a teenager in Westphalia, Northern Germany partly to relieve the pain of a broken engagement. One of five daughters in a Catholic family in Munster, Katrina received her first cutting scissors from an aunt at age sixteen. She had no instruction but plenty of time to experiment, as there was no school in Germany after the war ended until 1948. "I know I needed some kind of art...imagine my poor mother with four teenagers in the house! When I started the papercutting that was it."

While living in Munich with her American husband from 1963 to 1974, Katrina was inspired by a book describing the use of symbols and motifs in German folk art. Her earlier cuttings had been mostly silhouettes, but the symbols and their meanings became her new subjects. Bauernkunst, traditional art created by German farming communities, also provided Katrina with a lexicon of symbols. "It's your wish for the person you give the design to. So the farmers made beautiful paintings on the furniture just wishing their daughters all these good things. They couldn't read or write so they talked in symbol."

In 1994 interviews Katrina described scherenschnitt as "therapy" or a form of devotion. She recalled feeling unhappy and disoriented after moving to America, finding a peacefulness only by walking through farm fields behind her home in Glastonbury. Her cutting "George's Farm" celebrated rural life and illustrates her ability to translate a scene into narrative design. The process of cutting, the symbols and stories depicted, continue to reflect Katrina's own life.

Katrina's art also depicted larger narrative scenes. As a result of winning a Connecticut Commission on the Arts Visual Artist Award in 1994, Katrina created two scherenschnitt depicting views of Hartford from the west and east. Her love of symbolism is still present - as well as being the motif for The Hartford Insurance Company, "the stag is a symbol of light and shows the 'hart ford' where deer cross the river...the roses in Elizabeth Park are symbols of happiness." The designs capture the drama of coming upon the skyline of Hartford from either direction, as well as the many activities happening in and around the city.

Katrina's scherenschnitt communicates meaning, movement, and nuance through a continuous black line forming an outline against a white background. Her designs, which are cut in one piece, balance positive and negative, mass and openness, black and white. Cutting is done with open scissors rather than with their points. "For something fine like roses in the corner yes, I need the points, but only for a short time until I get the scissors in. I want to cut down and down and have the curve with one swoop and not with little cuts one after the other...because then you get little corners." Katrina sketches out guide lines for the design on the back of the black paper, but not details which are cut free hand. Her preferred paper is a medium weight stock from Germany, black on one side only. When the cutting is completed she glues it onto a white paper background. "The excitement is over and I frame it."