Stella (the bird) art

And then there is this one...

Hanging in a hallway and not in a place where I think to look every day.

Because, as everyone knows by now, Stella is bad. BAD. A hallway is a perfect place to hang her portrait because when you see it, you don't linger, you get through that hallway as fast as possible. Make your decision. Turn right. Turn left. Just do it NOW before you hit the wall.

Stella was just a couple years old when I painted her portrait but even then, I knew she had the personality of a contra fighter.

There is absolutely no reason to be so attached to such an "infestation of evil," but there you go.

Bert (the cat) art

This is a papier mache bowl I made that is covered with little portraits of Bert. The faces were based on an ink drawing I had done, which was then transferred to a linoleum block, carved out and then printed. 

Before I pasted each portrait of Bert onto the bowl, I ran a needle with some black thread through the paper so that when it was pasted, the thread would look like whiskers. Really messy, uncontrollable whiskers. I suppose I could have groomed them a little better but the craziness didn't bug me that much so I left them as is.

This is a side view of the bowl. The black glass buttons were attached to the bowl and then I coiled yellow paper around them to further secure them.

A similar ink drawing was used to make this larger linoleum block print of Bert. No thread whiskers this time. 

And this is the very first mosaic thing I ever made. So much fun. The woman holding the cat is a playing card from the turn of the century (the previous one, not this one!).

These three pieces are hanging together in an area I see nearly every day so I can remember a really good friend who happened to be a cat. :-)

More "More is More" mosaics

The little drawing was made by Jen Kostecki of her grey cheek parakeet Jackson. The frame is made of glass, small bits of mirrored glass, buttons, beads and a place card holder in the shape of a...goose?

It's hard to take a clear photo through glass, in a dark room and leaning over a birdcage with someone's beak letting you know they don't appreciate the intrusion over their airspace. This is the best I could do to get a good closeup of little Jack's portrait.

This is another Cathy Law collaged paper kitty. The frame is made of glass, buttons, beads, wire and one metal washer. The silvery looking glass was made by painting the reverse side with silver paint. 

I think this handsome kitty looks like a Chinese emperor in my overly embellished frame. 

There are a lot of celluloid buttons and beads used in this piece that are situated very close to metal. I've been lucky that after more than ten years, the celluloid has not crumbled into nothingness. If you have ever opened an old fruitcake tin filled with buttons and found a lot of crumbs at the bottom and some mystifying loose metal button shanks, those crumbs used to be celluloid buttons. Even if it's a glass jar, if you store celluloid buttons with metal buttons in something airtight, a chemical reaction takes place between the celluloid and metal causing both to disintegrate...mostly the celluloid. If you have some forgotten old buttons sitting somewhere, you might want to remove the celluloid ones and store them somewhere away from metal and not in something airtight. They need to breathe.

As always, click on the images if you want to see them in more detail.

Two examples of "More is More"

These two little mosaic frames are about 6 by 6 inches and are made of glass, a broken mirror, buttons (some stacked on top of other buttons), tumbled glass, and some extra things like a pair of ceramic shoes, a chandelier prism, an old rhinestone elephant pin with a broken clasp and some little plastic elephant charms.

I collect a lot of things (lusterware, honeycomb paper, hand-colored prints for example) but I also collect things just because of their color. One of my favorite colors to collect is "tango orange." It was a color popular in the 20s and 30s. It's a very intense, can't your take your eyes off it, reddish orange. It's probably one of those colors that was made with uranium. I don't care, I still adore it.

Inside these two frames are two little pieces of art from friends. The cut paper kitty in the top frame was done by Cathy Law (who has no flaw) and the one on the bottom? Well....I know I did the color. I had tested a red I was mixing (this was done in the pre-digital age) on a 3x5 and when I came back to my desk, I think a Mr. Dick Daniels  had dropped by to add some linework while I was away. :-)