FREMONT - With the Christmas season nearly upon us, elementary students here and throughout the country will soon be pushing pairs of round-edged scissors through white folded paper to create "snowflakes" to hang in their classrooms.
Yet for parents with children in schools where paper snowflakes are not in the lesson plan, there is little need to panic over fears of stifled creativity or a lost artistic future.
Your child might grow up to be a doctor.
Just ask Thomas L. Clark, of Ann Arbor, a retired physician who is known as "Dr. Snowflake" by admirers for his intricately detailed paper snowflakes that depict people, places, and things.
The Michigan native said he waited until middle age to craft his first flake, when a secretary where he worked at University Health Service in Ann Arbor showed him how in 1984.
"I guess most people learn sometime when they're in grade school," Dr. Clark, 68, said yesterday. "But I didn't."
More than 75 of Dr. Clark's paper snowflakes, wall mounted on colored matte board behind glass, will be on display tomorrow through Jan. 8 at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center Museum. The exhibit's highlight is The Nativity, a 50-flake narration of Jesus Christ's birth.
The doctor created the nativity series eight years ago, though this will be its first time at the museum. He said the series is a great demonstration of how the snowflake medium - with its 12 folded sections of cut-out images - can impart knowledge.
"The [snowflake] pictures are very much an avenue into understanding the stories," he said.
The exhibit will also feature several dozen classic snow-flakes from Dr. Clark's body of work that spans two decades. The designs range from Halloween-themed depictions of skeletons and poison bottles, to a 1987 "self-portrait" snowflake where six faces of Dr. Clark stare out from the edges of a flake with as many points.
For him, a snowflake isn't something you just slap to the wall.
"It's part of the art form to pattern them on the walls," said Dr. Clark, who retired in 1993 after more than 25 years in the medical profession, much of it spent in orthopedics. "The exhibit space becomes a work of art - not just the snowflakes themselves."
Like surgery, planning and cutting a snowflake is a delicate process than can take more than six hours. Dr. Clark sketches his plans in pencil, then slices and punches the designs onto the folded triangles of thin typewriter paper - using sewing scissors, electrician's screwdrivers, and Exacto knives.
His cutting tools have evolved over the years. "The first ones were [done] with bandage scissors in my office," he said.
But unlike surgery, Dr. Clark said that perfection is never his goal when making snowflakes: "Perfect is boring."
"Unless there's something grossly wrong, I usually accept what comes out," the doctor explained. "If you do it over, almost invariably there is some loss of vitality."
Dr. Clark is scheduled to give a free lecture about his work on Dec. 30 in the museum's auditorium.
Contact JC Reindl at: jreindl@theblade.com or 419-724-6050.
First Published November 21, 2006, 2:53 p.m.
