From Burnt Cardboard to Fine Art

July 24, 2015

Jay McCafferty’s solar paintings are unusual for one specific reason; instead of using paint as his primary medium he uses solar rays to create his artwork. McCafferty uses a magnifying glass to channel the sun’s rays and burn holes into stacks of painted vellum paper or cardboard. Each hole he burns is unique given the weather conditions and the reaction of the heat with the pigments, therefore, each piece takes on a very different appearance. Some of his works are aggressive and destructive whereas others are delicate and lacelike with thin, wispy smoke trails across the surface.

Jay McCafferty

Multiplicity of Centers 11, 2013

McCafferty does not plan his work. He does not have a design or composition already in mind, instead he simply concentrates on creating one hole at a time until he slowly makes a piece of art. As McCafferty once said,

“I have a strong theory that everything is ‘right now’. You can hypothesize about what happened before and fantasize about what is going to happen, but one thing I know for certain is right now is all that exists”.

This philosophy makes his work very process driven. He focuses on the meditative act of creating the holes and the properties of the materials he is working with. The paper is his stage and the creation of his artwork is a performance. Thus when a viewer looks at a completed piece the action of the artist is very obvious. For example, in McCafferty’s piece titled
Chobe
, which is part of the Escalette collection here at Chapman University one can see the jagged holes the artist burnt into the cardboard to create distorted puzzle piece shapes and the artist’s process is valued.