I found this so interesting--especially his wonderment about his epilepsy and whether that and his talent are related. I quoted much of the article but there is more to read if you click on the link provided below the story. ENJOY!
QUOTE |
He's pretty much always folding paper. Or thinking about folding paper. Or dreaming about it when he's asleep, picturing the hundreds of creases it will take to make a piece of paper smaller and more complicated. If you count the dreams, Matthew Jones says, he probably spends 75 percent of his time doing origami. And not just stylized paper cranes, perhaps the most famous example of the Japanese artform, but true-to-life house flies and pine cones and, once, the jaw bone of a deer. When he was 3, his mother brought home a book on origami. By age 5, he was inventing his own shapes, which year by year became more complex. Now, at 29, there is paper all over his house. He wonders if there's a connection between his epilepsy, which began at age 14, and his origami talents. Maybe, he says, a brain-wiring malfunction is responsible for both; maybe the same thing that allows him to visualize the thousands of folds that make up an origami centipede is also the thing that makes him stiffen and shake. He's never met an object he couldn't figure out how to fold, he says, although it's taken years to solve the origami wasp problem. But there are plenty of things that he would choose not to make into origami, simply because they'd be too tedious. A lawn, he says, by way of example. Or the human genome. His default origami is a cicada, which he can fold effortlessly, without looking. Because of his epilepsy, he walks instead of drives - a man in fedora and suspenders who spends a lot of time looking at the ground, noticing what the rest of us ignore. It took him nine hours to turn a piece of paper into a centipede. It's an exact replica but not a perfect one - because Jones always tries to make some small imperfection in each piece he creates. Not a tear, of course, because the ethics of origami say no tearing, no cutting. Just some small blemish to convince him he needs to keep folding. |
I can imagine the great works he has done after the making of that realistic spider out of folding paper. To me origami is not so easy as it takes creativity and skill to keep everything together.