Artist Feature: John Zabrucky

Artist Feature: John Zabrucky

By Oren Giladi

John Zabrucky is an artist and designer living in Los Angeles. He both works in the film industry and creates independent bodies of art using our various handmade papers. The majority of his works are drawings and collages done on our Yucatan and Bhutan papers.   John has been drawing on our papers for years. In his studio we leafed through hundreds of works and picked out a few highlighting multiple techniques.   

John Zabrucky on Bhutan and Yucatan

John’s work contains imagery of machine parts, diagrams and geometric patterns. Usually done in black ink set against the natural toned papers. The two pieces above are a mix of drawing and collage. The piece on the left is using our Yucatan solid natural paper. The white lines are collaged strips of our thinner inkjet papers. The piece on the right is also a collage using our Bhutan natural dyed paper. Both papers are sturdy and rustic platforms that can stand up to several layers of work and at the same time highlight the delicate precision of the black ink.

John Zabrucky on Yucatan

This last work is also done on our Yucatan solid natural paper. In person the larger black areas in the drawing are heavily saturated with ink and have a rich velvet quality. John’s work is a great example of using papers that are made with a specific purpose for a new end, which yields unexpected results. The Yucatan papers are coated for ink and laser jet printing so they are designed to receive the color black. These drawings and collages reveal how the high quality of handmade paper is allowed to shine while simultaneously highlighting unexpected techniques.