Paper Route

Paintings, photography, sculpture and assemblage populate most of the workspaces for the 2026 Santa Barbara Studio Artists tour that takes place every Labor Day weekend. But it’s a fairly good bet that if you join the 25th anniversary of the self-guided visit to artist studios around town, you won’t see much that resembles what paper artist Marilyn McRae produces.

McRae works almost exclusively with roll-up pieces of existing printed paper, drawn largely from recycled magazines, books or other publications, fashioning fascinating and brightly colored three-dimensional mosaics that become much more than the sum of their parts. Layers of color, texture, and typography emerge from the printed fragments of everyday media, turning the familiar materials into images that are both striking and an invitation for closer inspection.

What’s surprising for something so intriguing is that McRae stumbled upon the concept pretty much absentmindedly.

“I’ve told this story many times, but it’s true,” she said. “Like many of us do – or did when there were a lot of magazines around – I took one and rolled it up then started fanning the edges. All of a sudden I was struck by the colors and the textures, and it hit me, ‘I could do something with that!’”

On the other hand, it’s not all that surprising that McRae found a new method for art in magazine paper. She’s been working in creative fields all of her adult life. As a student she designed her own clothes, and later remodeled homes. A home economics major at Cal Poly, she spent nearly a quarter-century working in the film industry as a freelance food stylist with clients ranging from industry giants Kraft and Best Foods to fast food restaurants. The latter required sharp attention to the minutiae of how subtle changes in lighting and placement can deeply affect what food looks like in photos or a TV commercial.

“The idea was to make everything look irresistibly edible,” she said.

It wasn’t that great a leap to apply her experience to meticulously shaping and manipulating paper, which she started doing a few years into retirement back in 2012. As she did in her days working with foodstuffs, McRae performs all of the rolling, shaping and (otherwise indefinable) transforming of paper pieces by hand.

“I knew nothing about paper, but I learned quickly,” she said. “There are so many different ways of cutting or tearing it either against the grain or with the grain, and different methods of folding. It’s just been a fun discovery.”

At first McRae used whatever magazines she came across but soon realized she could separate the materials by colors, weights, finish and other variables, creating a paper artist’s equivalent of a painter’s palette.

“I have drawers full of all the different options. There are lots of tools, from different types of scissors, dowels, tweezers for handling the little pieces. Different types of adhesive depending on what I’m doing, too.”

More recently, she’s started separating out the paper based on content, such as watches, lips or other themes, using the similarly-themed subjects to create works that have nothing to do with the themes. Although abstracts have made appearances, the majority of what McRae creates are free-flowing interpretations of nature, including scenes from her home abutting the golf course in Hope Ranch, a view that sports lush greenery and a little lake.

The patience developed over a career in food styling comes in handy in manipulating paper to create a collage, as a single work can take many multiples of hours to go from pasting down the first piece to a finished project.

“It’s a slow process,” she said. “Some are extremely intricate, and the bigger pieces could take up to 200 hours. Honestly, I used to keep track of time, but now I don’t. What’s the point? I’m enjoying it.”

Indeed, McRae said the entire pursuit becomes a meditative process. The word bored doesn’t enter, ahem, the picture.

“It’s very relaxing and calming,” she said. “I can have my music on or a podcast playing. I love every minute.”

McRae said she’s looking forward to her sixth year on the SBSA tour, particularly the interactions with visitors, especially those viewing her work for the first time.

“I love to watch them first see a piece from a distance and you can tell they’re thinking, ‘What am I looking at?’” she said. “They get closer and see the little piece of paper and then go back and forth. It’s a little dance that everybody does.”