The Last Silhouettist: May 2014

Filming for ‘Silhouette Secrets’ is now almost complete. Andi and I returned from a crowd-funded shoot in the USA just over a month ago. The main item on our agenda was a trip to Houston to meet the world’s fastest silhouette artist: Cindi Harwood Rose. Cindi has held this record for nearly 30 years, having cut 144 silhouettes in one hour at an event in the 1980’s, and the film will end with me going to Houston to challenge it. Cindi kindly arranged for a charity speed-cutting contest to take place in a local Audi showroom, rather alarmingly called “Off With Your Head!".

The rules of the contest were fairly simple. We each had a table to work at and one assistant to help us mount the silhouettes and hand them out. My daughter Taz (herself a promising silhouettist) flew with us to Houston to act as my assistant. Guests at the event collected pink and blue tickets and were asked to drop blue tickets into a bowl on my table and pink ones into a bowl on Cindi’s; at the end of the evening the tickets would be counted to determine the outcome.

There were a number of craft stalls (including a paper cutter and an origami artist), a silhouette historian, a food buffet and a bar at the event. Some 200 guests and a contingent of local press arrived. On my table I had a pile of printed cards - bearing the logo of the local cancer charity for whom the event was being staged - and my usual squares of black and white paper, each stamped with a number to help me tell how fast I was cutting.

Cindi and I took our positions and a large queue immediately formed at both tables. The contest got off to a shaky start for me, as the MC announced:

“The competition is about to start: Three - Two - ONE!”

which caused me to hesitate for a vital few seconds, slightly confused. Should I start cutting? Does ‘One’ in Houston mean ’Go’?

Once over this unpromising start I soon warmed to the task in hand and began to enjoy myself. It was a luxury to be assisted by Taz and to have an MC directing the traffic. I even found time to laugh and joke with a few of the guests - who all did exactly as they had been told: standing on the ‘X’ and looking straight ahead.

Twenty minutes - and some 50 silhouettes - later the pressure began to tell and I found it harder to keep up the relentless pace. My mouth became dry and the scissors began to feel heavy as lead. Mark, the cameraman, asked me to speak a few words about how I was feeling but my reply was sadly incoherent. Taz helped by feeding me mouthfuls of water as I cut, after a while the feeling passed and I entered a kind of ‘second wind’.

The final twenty minutes were a real joy. I found myself cutting faster than I ever have before, my hands began to feel better and the numbers indicated I was on track to achieve my target. To say the silhouettes were flying off the scissors is perhaps an exaggeration but as I passed the one-hundred mark that is really how I felt.

A selection of 24-second speed-cut silhouettes made during the final twenty minutes of "Off With Your Head!"

The end of the contest brought a brief period of excitement as my silhouette numbers indicated I might actually have broken the record! Rather embarrassingly I even sent out an ill-advised tweet or two to this effect, which had to be hurriedly retracted some time later when the official ticket count became available. Andi, with typical humour, posted a Facebook update asking “Will we get out of Texas alive?”.

The official result was slightly disappointing as it seems neither Cindi or I equalled her existing record, although we both came very close: the final score was 141 to Cindi and 139 to me, leaving Cindi's 30-year-old record untouched. Although I didn’t beat the record I came to understand how it is possible to cut such huge numbers, and how I might go about beating this record in future. I had to remind myself that the result was less important than filming the event, which was a huge success and will make an interesting sequence in ’Silhouette Secrets’.

Here are some photos of the event: