I got a curious commission from a European museum, via the Czech Origami Society, to make an origami bust of J. Robert Oppenheimer: the physicist who led the Manhattan Project in the race to develop the atom bomb. He’s been in the public mind owing to the recent film about him starring Cilian Murphy (who has a somewhat similar facial structure) which I did not particularly like; at any rate all that moviegoers seem to remember is a guy with a wide-brimmed hat. The bust would go into an exhibition that the Czech Origami Society was organizing at the Museum of the South Pilsner Region in Blovice, honoring the 80th anniversary of the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an event that in Japan is honored by schoolchildren folding origami cranes by the thousands and depositing the wreaths at memorial shrines, but in the Czech folders’ hands would be given a wider origami interpretation, possibly with darker elements.
This assignment was not an easy one. I’d worked out a technique for making faces and even full heads from single strips of paper but doing a representation of a particular person is a different story entirely. Also, my few previous origami portraits were either flattish or used paper backed by thick aluminum foil; this time I wanted to run with my new 3D head technique that uses pure paper (in fact, 300gsm all-cotton paper), which when stained, wet-folded and let to dry gives a wonderfully luxurious look. Now in theory, with wet-folding you can re-dampen a structure after it’s folded and dried so as to make minor adjustments; in practice the more you do this the more the paper starts to look ‘tired’. Since freshness requires minimal retouching I had to continuously refine the design and rehearse it at various scales until the whole process could be done in one go, probably 7-8 hours folding in full concentration, making no mistakes. Judge for yourself how far I have succeeded.
My more ambitious plan was to extend the head downward, with a neck and shirt-and-tie: perhaps later the jacket that Oppie virtually always wore (and later still somehow the equally ubiquitous pipe or cigarette). This I was not able to do in a large-scale version for the time being, but a small sketch that nicely shows what I mean about keeping surfaces "fresh" is part of what I sent in my packet to the Czech Republic.
If you’re in the area---go have a look.
S