Zambezi

More adventures with cardboard lunch trays. This is an assemblage/collage inspired by the intense sunsets in Africa that I'm calling Zambezi.

The photography skills I've so painstakingly tried to develop with birds and buildings turn out to be fairly useless when taking pictures of art, especially a piece as glossy and textured as this. Either I had too much light and everything sparkled annoyingly, or not enough and the whole thing was a black and orange blur. This photo is an unsatisfactory compromise between sparkly and blurry.

Below is a sample of the trays I'm using for materials in various projects. There's also  a smaller size without the little embossed squares that I especially like, but I usually have to make do with these.

 

Frog

Here's a small piece I made this week, a gift for my friend Ann, artist and photographer and lover of frogs, who is retiring today. She had given me her hoard of cardboard lunch trays a while back, so it seemed fitting that I make her something out of them, adapting the design from an Art Deco tile I saw online.

It's just paper cut into frog legs and arms and eyes and painted green, and pasted onto an artist board I had painted black after a failed experiment in assemblage, but I like it very much.

I had to leave her party after five minutes and half a glass of champagne due to a software emergency, and it was a long sweaty trudge home in 95-degree heat, so I'm enjoying revisiting the soothing shiny greens of my frog and dreaming of other animals I could imagine into paper cutouts.

And now for something completely different

This is a different kind of exploration.

I've made jewelry for many years, out of all kinds of materials, and gradually that turned into bigger and bigger pieces until I was making paintings and assemblages that I sometimes refer to as my "wall jewelry."

My best pieces tend to be the ones where I start by playing with the materials, instead of having an idea and then trying to find materials to realize it. I've become more and more interested in recycling and repurposing things I'd otherwise throw out: plastic spoons and forks, candy wrappers, old CD's and DVD's.

The cafeteria at my office has cardboard takeout trays made of thick rough recycled paper. It's very porous and sucks up paint like a sponge, but the texture makes interesting effects with glossy or metallic  finishes. Recently I tried soaking pieces in warm water after painting and then shaping them -- tricky because it's cheap paper and the layers have a tendency to fall apart -- and it gets a leathery look I like a lot.


This is a pendant I made by shaping the painted paper into tubes and gluing them together (the orange is actually nail polish) and then to a base of a painted paper circle I had left over from another project.


Because it's so lightweight it doesn't need a heavy bail. I made a clasp out of wire that can hook onto any chain or necklace, glued it to the back, and voila!