Jan Blough found inspiration for her art when she needed to brighten a bare wall in her Victorian house for an upcoming historic homes tour. She began with an old household ledger, uncovered in a wall during construction. The ledger was written in 1856, and had belonged to a local businessman who lived in the Fenton, Michigan, home.
Jan imagined what the businessman looked like and cut a full-length shadow profile on black paper. She pasted his silhouette onto a frayed, yellowed page of the ledger. The piece, when framed and mounted, gave wonderful historical interest to that plain wall and connected the paper to the house, as she intended.
The silhouette piece caught the eye of many visitors on that tour sixteen years ago, which prompted Jan to pursue traditional portraiture. She perfected her hand-cutting skills and combined them with her background in stained glass. She was once a mechanical engineer who designed dashboard instruments for General Motors!
Jan’s clean, precise cuts are superimposed on original eighteenth- or nineteenth-century documents, sheet music, and handwritten letters. “Each piece tells a story all its own,” she said. Images that she renders include children, birds, natural elements, plants, garden gates, tools such as scissors, and spectacles, to name a few.
The practice of cutting profiles as solid shapes on black paper with a white background became fashionable in the mid-eighteenth century. The silhouette provided an accessible alternative to the miniature portrait paintings that were commissioned by the upper class.
The term "silhouette" was derived from the name of a French finance minister, Etienne de Silhouette, who in 1759 was forced to impose crippling taxes, particularly on the wealthy, due to a financial crisis that stemmed from the Seven Years’ War. Vilified by his struggling countrymen, Silhouette’s name became synonymous with anything done or made inexpensively. These outline portraits remained the simplest way to record a person’s appearance until the advent of the camera. The negative connotation eventually morphed into a respect for the art form.
To keep the handmade artwork within reach to all, the Bloughs scale down most pieces to fit a 3-by-3-inch ornament. Each one is a lithographed print of the original hand-cut silhouette mounted on an original document.
Jan said she taught her husband, Mark, a retired police officer, how to cut straight glass to size and then frame each piece with a lead-free solder. Each ornament is signed and dated by Jan, and finished with a piece of long black ribbon.