Creative Use for Plastic Bags

I took some pictures for this blog while travelling in England and Scandanavia this summer, but did very little blogging from there, so I have a little catching up to do. I saw this clever reuse of plastic shopping bags (what the Brits call "carrier bags") one evening while killing a little time before I went to see a play at the Old Red Lion pub, near the Angel tube station. (Pub theater is great. This place was a nice pub downstairs, with a tiny, tiny theater upstairs. You buy your ticket, get a pint, and when the bell rings to let you know to go upstairs, you bring your pint along. I didn't love the play, but I did enjoy the overall theater experience.) So, an empty storefront window had been artfully filled with crumpled plastic bags, affording privacy to whatever was going on behind the window, I suppose. Of course it's too bad that there are so many plastic bags in the world to begin with, but I liked this clever repurposing of them. There are some movements afoot to ban plastic bags, such as this one in San Francisco. Here is another story about the international movement to get rid of them. I'm all for such bans. Here is another site to get you acquainted with the issue.

More Art on Reused Paper

I've twice before posted about art on old paper: on newspaper here, and on old book pages here. Well, here is some more, by Susan at Artstream, which I found on her blog, Art Esprit. One of these days (like when I'm once again in possession of an income other than unemployment insurance) I'll have to get one of these pieces.

Do you have 188 bowling balls that you don't know what to do with?

My father and I took a trip to Vermont's 'Northeast Kingdom' last week. We had a great time driving around the beautiful countryside. We drove by this one day, and I just had to turn around to get a few pictures. What a great idea! And it really looks terrific. It was on Rte 58 in northern Vermont, a few miles east of Lowell. I checked, and it is bowling balls all the way through. I did the math, and there are 188 bowling balls here. Wow!

More Art Using Recycled Materials - Anti-Consumerist!

In my last post I wrote about a great painting I saw recently that used newspaper. In the comments there I got a reference to more art using newspaper. Here this artist's site. I really like the juxtaposition of consumerism with the reality of suffering and war. Check it out for yourself and tell me what you think.

More Art Using Recycled Materials

A while back, I posted about some art that really caught my eye at Artesprit. As I said, I liked it not just because it was lovely, but because it reused old materials, namely pages from old books. Well, while in Cheltenham recently, I spotted this piece in a gallery, which had done something similar, only this time with the front page from a newpaper.At first you might not quite notice the front page lying behind the painting, but then you see it in the corners especially: This piece is by Akash Bhatt, and was on display at Martin's Gallery in Cheltenham Spa, in the Cotswold region of England.

My sister Martha makes all sorts of great assemblage art pieces out of various kinds of found objects, scrounged materials, and recycled stuff. Her art is a little hard to describe, but Joseph Cornell's boxes come to mind as a comparison. Here is a little piece she made that I have and love. I think the scene in the background and on the back is The Flume, or at least I like to think so. She has a studio in her basement full of great materials for her art, lots of stuff that I covet.

More Trash to Buy (and cheaper this time)

My friend the Lynneguist just sent me this link to a post on Boing Boing. Here is some more trash you can buy - a smaller and cheaper version of this trash-qua-art that I posted about some time ago. Thanks Lynne!

Some Great Art on Nice Old Paper Book Pages

I love this art, and if I was more fiscally inclined to spend money these days, these really lovely drawings would make a happy addition to my home (they are quite affordable, but I'm quite broke these days). What appeals to me, if you haven't already guessed, and in addition to their general loveliness, is that they are on old book pages! I love that - what a clever idea. You can check them out here. They are showing in a gallery in NH, which you can check out here.

New York City Garbage as Art!

I was just sorting through and trying to organize all the sites that I've bookmarked in the past few months, and I came across
this article about Justin Gignac
who collects NYC garbage and packages it as art. (I no longer remember who sent me this link, but thanks!) What he is doing is very cool on many fronts: he's recycling, he's stretching our concept of 'art', he's calling attention to how much stuff gets thrown out (especially in NYC), and to boot he is making money doing it! I love it. You can
check out his site here.

Hardware Store = Art Gallery

Several months back, a revered old hardware store here in Utica, Doyle's Hardware, closed its doors forever. I was very sad. Doyle's was the perfect place to get all sorts of hardware, including old fashioned screws and parts for lamps that are otherwise hard to find. They originally had five stores throughout Utica, but as those had closed, they had consolidated all their stock into the huge, three story brick store down by the train station. So, the store had all sorts of old things with nice old prices on them. As they were getting ready to close their doors, prices, already low, got slashed. I picked up three of these old brushes for 30% off of $2.65! I picked them up just because I really liked how they looked, and because right off they struck me as having a certain sculptural quality. For a while, they were just piled up on a table in my living room. I really liked how the orange worked with my greenish blue walls. But I knew that I really wanted to hang them on those blue walls, so after I finally got around to painting my stairwell, I found just the right spot for them under the windows on my landing. By then I had already decided that I was going to paint my stair risers a color other than the off-white I use for all my trim and woodwork. So, I hit upon the idea of painting the risers the same orange. I took a brush to J-Kay, where Sam Rudolph (who has been incredibly helpful with many a paint color dilemma) mixed up a quart of paint in that very same orange. The color adds a bit of punch to a color scheme that I sometimes worry heads a little in a conservative direction. The morale of this little story is that you can find art in unexpected places!

It looks like art to me

The best kind of trash-to-treasure story is when I can tell you that I just ripped a board off an old building and nailed it to my wall and called it art. Okay, so there was bubble wrap to buy (which went completely against my grain), ticket agents to be placated, planes to be boarded, several states to be flown over, luggage to be retrieved, so on and so forth, between the said ripping and said nailing, but let's not quibble, okay?

It went like this: my sister and brother-in-law (seen here) and I were exploring a great old ghost town in Montana after a family reunion in July 2005 - Elkhorn Abandoned. I saw many things I would have like to save from the eventual ravages of weather and abandonment, but most were well beyond the patience of any ticket agent. Then I found this roof board on a low lying roof of some sort of old mill. I pulled it off pretty easily, but it was about 10 feet long, so my brother-in-law kindly stepped on it just so, shortening it to a manageable 6 feet. Next day, I flew out of Bozeman, back to the East coast, with the board safely stowed in the bellies of the planes. It eventually made it all the way to upstate New York, with its lovely lichen and rusty nails perfectly intact.

When I finally found just the right spot for it, I couldn't figure out how best to hang it, but then I noticed the hole just the right size for a rusty nail I retrieved from my basement. And so here we go - a great piece of trash-to-treasure art!