Barry Brown

Artist and Paper Crafter, Barry Brown Creative | Paper Fashion Show Award Winner

Barry Brown has been making things out of paper ever since origami was introduced in the elementary school math pod. As a teen, he learned the art of Scherenschnitte by watching artist Judith Meyers in a Greeley art gallery. Studying music and theater at UNC, he discovered a 1940's blank-and-white book on department store window displays made entirely of paper while researching ways to pay for tuition at Michener Library. He learned the techniques, and produced theatrical window displays and posters for the theater program for several years. Later, in Denver he worked as a featured graphic artist at a prominent event decorating company. At that time, Barry was researching dresses made of magazine covers when he stumbled across The One Club for Creativity Denver's Paper Fashion Show. He has never studied fashion, but loves to play with paper, so he joined team "pulp function" to create his first design entitled "caged beauty." The following year, he created "the butterfly effect." Each design won first place awards. The following two years, he competed solo, winning consecutive first place awards with his designs "Gloria Deo" and "Sprit of the Golden Wind." One of his favorite paper projects was folding 1400 paper airplanes with kids from Denver Children's Home, which was installed in a downtown Denver atrium, to celebrate Amelia Rose Earhart's record-setting flight around the world in a single engine airplane. Barry's most recent Paper Fashion design was a tea-length wedding dress, stunningly covered with intricately cut paper "thistle lace." His current work is part of his "cardboard kingdom," which includes cardboard automata: winged jungle animals made entirely from cardboard, which "fly" by turning a cardboard crank. He teaches summer camps and school enrichment programs focusing on paper art, the most popular of which is entitled "cardboard destructo camp."

www.barrybrowncreative.com