Creative Cutting

July 21, 2006

MATTHEW CHURNEY, 47, has been cutting elaborate patterns into his T-shirts for the past 20 years. He’s also occasionally made pieces for other people—including Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and Smashing Pumpkins drummer Jimmy Chamberlain.

What do you call what you do?

Razor-cut work. People, if they want to get fancy, would call me a fabric artist. It’s nothing more than drawing, but with a razor blade. I’ll do letters, figures, an eagle, the shape of a snake that was detailed enough to see scales and the tongue and teeth. There’s no limit except for the imagination or what the basic structure of something will allow.

What inspires you?

A lot of the T-shirts I work with already have some artwork on it. I just look at the basic shape or if there’s any kind of action going on, any particular direction. Like I had a Triumph shirt that had outspread wings, so I did lines across going straight up like a bow.

Do you do this to all your T-shirts?

No, not all. Most of them though.

Why?

I was on the punk scene and people were doing different stuff, expressing themselves, and I wanted something to kind of express myself. If it’s a shirt I want to wear a lot, I do it not just for the look but also for the comfort. It allows the air to get to my skin a lot better. I started doing these bandanas because basically when it gets so hot and humid you don’t want a doubled-over bandana that’s going to keep all the heat inside.

Do you have a day job?

I wound up on disability because I’d gone through some pretty major changes and I wound up being diagnosed as bipolar. And I had a knee injury, so I think a combination of the physical and what I’d gone through mentally made that happen. I’m really not technically allowed to work a regular job.

What does this do for you? Is it soothing?

Yeah, on some levels it is. I think any time you enter into a creative mode, even when I play hacky sack, you’re on a different level. When you’re focused on that all your cares and worries fade away. —Liz Armstrong