[hammer taps]
- Kathleen Trenchard: I was doing painting,
printmaking, drawing.
When I moved to San Antonio,
that's when I discovered papel picado,
which means literally "punched paper."
[hammer taps[
I realized that this is an incredible craft.
So people were not thinking of this as an art form at all.
And I went to Mexico and began to research it.
Papel picado probably started with the Manila galleons
coming over from China and bringing papel china,
the Chinese paper.
It was very thin colored paper.
So the little Mexican villages, resourceful as they were,
they figured out how to punch this paper
using chisels to make it into paper lace for their altars.
[gentle music]
And as I explore this more and more, I'm challenging myself.
How close can I come to duplicating one of my drawings
as a paper cut?
You can use thin and thick lines to make a sort of perspective.
I cut the most difficult thing first,
because if I'm gonna make a mistake,
I wanna make a mistake on the difficult thing
before I move on to the easy stuff,
so that if I have to start over again,
I can still start over again.
But that never happens. [laughs]
Instead, if I make a mistake, I figure out a way to change it.
Hopefully make it better.
This one is gonna be hung in a museum. [chuckles]
Here's the drawing.
[gentle music]
From the beginning, when I started working
on papel picado, right away, I thought,
"I'm doing something that makes people happy."
It's an ephemeral art form, and it's fun.
And I'm almost totally absorbed in commissions,
here in this great city.
I'm gonna show you what a luminaria is.
Here I have a couple of them that I've made.
This is a Mexican tradition.
It's inexpensive decorations that you can do at home,
out of just little white pastry bags.
I'm gonna do five of them here.
And my pattern has to be attached to the five layers.
So, this will do it.
So, I'm gonna start with the easiest thing,
which is a hole punch.
And I'm just gonna go around the periphery
of my snowflake.
Now, the next thing I'm gonna do
is I'm gonna add these little triangles,
and I'm gonna go all around in one direction.
And then I go the other direction.
[hammer taps]
Now, I'm picking up another chisel
for the bottom of the triangles.
So, we've got our holes in place and our triangles in place.
You can do luminarias all year round,
but people begin to think about them more at Christmas time.
Now, hole in the center.
And the next thing is gonna be the scalloped edge on top.
(hammer taps)
Now, we have the results.
We're just gonna take off the pattern
and we're gonna open 'em up and you'll see,
and then you put your sand and your tea candle in it,
and you're ready for your celebration.
There. [gentle music]