Artist Preserves Images of Lowcountry One Snip at a Time

Story by Gail Parsons
Photography by Erich Perez

Using a 60-year-old pair of Revlon cuticle scissors, Norm Owens deftly snips at a piece of black paper creating intricately detailed silhouettes of people, animals, trees, birds, and marsh grass.

 The 80-year-old interior designer has cut silhouettes since he was a child but only recently learned the way he does it is unique.

“I don’t use a pattern or draw it out first,” he said. “Most people are amazed because they want you to sketch it out but then you’re forced to follow a pattern. This way, it’s actually more of an impromptu art.

According to an article in Trend & Tradition magazine, silhouette portraiture was popular in America in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It was an affordable option over a costly painted portrait. Of the artists who create cut silhouette portraits, there are only about 20 in the world known to work completely freehand, the article states.

Advances in camera photography aided in the decline of silhouette portrait art. It is also why Owens isn’t fond of creating portraits.

“I never have liked doing them and the reason I don’t like it is because I don’t care how good you are people are used to seeing a photograph,” he said.

Instead, the inspiration for his designs comes from what he described as his first love—the Lowcountry.

Finding Silhouette Art

Raised in Hampton, South Carolina, Owens was first introduced to the art when he was about 12 years old. He saw a set of glass tumblers by silhouette artist Carew Rice.

“He did a set of tumblers,” Owens said. “To me, they were the most gorgeous things I’d ever seen in my life. I would sit and stare at them, hoping I could do it.”

He owns four of those tumblers and counts them among his most prized possessions, enough so that anytime he has had to evacuate because of a hurricane, they are carefully packaged up and go with him.

“It’s the first thing I grab,” he said. “They are irreplaceable.”

There have been replications made of Rice’s tumblers, but the quality doesn’t come close in comparison to the originals.

Each of the tumblers has landscape scenes of the Lowcountry. With Owens’ love for the region already stamped on his heart, the silhouette tumblers sparked his interest in the art form.

Owens had the opportunity to meet Rice one time and learned that he too was self-taught in the art and the two had grown up about 15 miles apart from each other.

While the subject matter of both men’s silhouettes was similar, Owens said a professor once pointed out that he had “a little bit more of a delicacy in the delicate cuts than (Rice’s) does.”

When he started learning the art form, he didn’t have the right black paper available to him. Construction paper is too thick and heavy to make the cuts. So, rather than cutting black silhouettes and mounting them on white paper, he worked in the reverse.

In school, each day started with chapel programs and he was in charge of creating the artwork. He recalled one of his teachers being very encouraging with a few simple words.

“She said to me, ‘Work on this,’” he said. “And you know, I have learned that you can do a lot of things simply by doing.”

Thinking in Pictures

When Owens picks up a piece of paper and starts snipping away at it, he usually has an idea of where he’s going with it. Turning the paper over and over as he cuts out shapes, he’s working off memories of the Lowcountry.

“I think in pictures,” he said, as he recently demonstrated his technique. “I might change my mind a couple of times because I wasn’t sure exactly how I wanted it.”

But he knew he wanted a duck, an ibis and one of his favorites—a tree with Spanish moss similar to the ones that grow in the swampy areas near his home.

“They’re not grand, glorious trees, but they are beautiful to me,” he said. “And the Spanish moss is a symbol of the South.”

The Fine Details

The most difficult part of cutting the silhouettes is fine details, like the tiny spaces between a bird’s legs as it is taking flight or in the branches of a tree. It’s those delicate details that are the hallmark of Owens' work, but they don’t come by accident.

He spends hours sitting by the river, or near the marsh just observing the world around him.

“You have to go out and look,” he said. “Is this the way a cypress tree grows? Is this how a palmetto tree grows? An oak tree? What do birds look like in flight? I have one of a heron in flight, coming off a piece of grass—I went out one day to The Battery in Charleston and just watched them coming in and going out and coming in.”

In watching them so close he could see their feet go straight out and when they’re in flight their neck goes back and curves. The way they fly is different than other birds. These are the kind of details that he cuts into his silhouettes.

While most of his work is landscape and he doesn’t do portraits, he has cut full-body silhouettes of Gullah people.

“They fall into some of the most graceful poses, but they don’t like you to watch them,” he said.

They are also an important part of life in the region and that is what Owens tries to show in his art.

“It’s a good way to show the Lowcountry to people who are not from here,” he said.

Some of his pieces are cut with a frame, those he described as, “Pieces of paper with holes in it. That’s all it is,” he said.

Other silhouettes seem to float on the white background.

“It’s like it has no beginning and no end,” he said. “It’s just like a snippet of something I have seen. It’s not a real place, but it’s sort of a combination as I think it should be, and that’s why I like it, to me, there’s a certain grace and charm. You really just don’t know how to put your finger on it, but you know, it’s there.”

Sometimes he’ll cut one based on a request like the time a gentleman from New York said he wanted one with palmetto trees and a sailboat with the sail down. He made it and liked it well enough to replicate it but with the sail up. That one is on display at George C. Birlant Antiques & Gifts in Charleston, the only place that carries Owens’ work.

Interior Design

While Owens can turn out an intricately cut silhouette in about 30 minutes, the art is only a piece of his creativity. He is an interior designer by trade.

“I was in high school when I realized I could sell my artwork,” he said. “But after I got out of high school and college, that’s when I really knew if I wanted to go in that direction, I could, but I didn’t want to be an artist, you know, trying to make a living at it. So, I became an interior designer.”

Straight out of college, he started work in a design firm and then went to Sears and Roebuck, where he got a job in the custom drapery department.

“I had this wonderful lady who sort of took me under her wing and believe you me, she knew her draperies,” he said.

Sears was also where he learned that sometimes business takes priority over creativity and art—it was a lesson he was not comfortable with. He was sent to give someone a quote on new draperies. The room had high/low sculptured carpet in multiple colors, wing-back chairs with a busy pattern and the client wanted draperies with a print.

He gave her his honest opinion.

“By the time I got back to the store, she had gotten on the phone and called, not my immediate boss, but the one over him,” he said. “He said, ‘Boy you have stepped in it big time.’ I said they should put that room on wheels and take it around to people of good taste and say, ‘It could happen to you.’”

He didn’t get fired but was told in no uncertain terms they were in the business of selling merchandise. He soon left that job and went to work for Ethan Allen, but still craved the freedom to handle interior design the way he wanted and the way he felt would benefit the clients.

He started Interiors by Norman, in 1999 in Savannah and in 2008 relocated to Pooler. In design, he said his strength is the Charleston look.

“Charleston to me, is just heaven on earth,” he said. “My new slogan is, ‘The Charleston look, old and new.’ Not everybody wants the old look. They want a contemporary look, and that’s easy.”

What he strives for is to combine traditional pieces that are a hallmark of the Charleston look, with the modern, more contemporary.

The interior design work allows him to make a living in a creative field but it also affords him time to enjoy the Lowcountry and share it with others through his art.