Pascal-Adolphe-Jean Dagnan-Bouveret

Wedding at the photographers, 1878-79, Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret.

Pascal-Adolphe-Jean Dagnan-Bouveret
Self-portrait

Artists today take for granted working from photos, even if they don't actually do so in creating their own work. Virtually all portrait artists today use photos to some extent. I've drawn from life hundreds of times but I can recall only once, in a figure painting class in college, having painted a model from life. I'm not sure what artist may have been the first to use a photo as source material in a painting, though I wouldn't be surprised if it was Edouard Manet in the early 1860s--Le déjeuner sur l'herbe (Luncheon in the Grass). Such a designation is difficult to make because few artists at the time would have admitted to such a practice and in any case, it's unlikely any photos they may have used would have survived. One exception to that was the outstanding French painter, Pascal-Adolphe-Jean Dagnan-Bouveret (with a name like that he'd better be outstanding).



An Accident, 1880, Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret (the second of two versions).

Pascal Dagnan (along with two of his other names) was born in 1852, the son of a Paris tailor. While he was still quite young, his father took off for Brazil and never came back. Consequently, the boy was raised by his grandfather, whose name was Bouveret, hence the addition of the hyphenated fifth name. Though displaying considerable skill at a young age, Pascal Dagnan was forty before he began his formal art education at the prestigious Ecole des Beaux Arts where he came under the tutelage of Alexander Cabanal and Jean-Leon Gerome, two of the major kingpins of Academic art. With such an academic pedigree, one might expect Dagnan-Bouveret to have become one of the thousands of carbon copy academicians the Ecole was famed for turning out like picture postcards. That was not the case. Though Dagnan-Bouveret's style was undeniably Academic, his paintings (for the most part) were not. If anything, one would have to say they more closely resembled the work of the academy's number one thorn in its side (or pain in the butt), Gustave Courbet.

Horses at the Watering Trough,
1884, Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret

The photo used for the left third of
Horses at the Watering Trough (left).

In 1872, Dagnan-Bouveret opened a studio in Paris with fellow classmate, Gustave-Claude-Etienne Courtois. His Wedding at the photographers (top) from 1878-79 hints at his working from photos even at such an early date (photography was barely 30 years old at the time). By 1880 Dagnan-Bouveret was winning Salon medals for his work, An Accident (above, center) in 1880 and Horses at the Watering Trough (above, left) in 1885. It is this latter work we find most interesting in that one of the photos he used in painting the horse on the left, still survives (above, right). Photos were a godsend in painting animals.

Day of Forgiveness in Brittany, 1886, Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret 

In 1886, Dagnan-Bouveret painted Day of forgiveness in Brittany (above), and it is from this work that we gain the most insight into the artist's use of a single photo in creating his painted image. The photo from which the majority of the painting is rendered is below. Though the standing male figures at left are cropped in the photo and there have been some adjustments in the grouping of the nuns, Dagnan-Bouveret's reliance on photography in achieving his realism goes well beyond that of Academic painting into the realm of the natural Realism of Courbet some twenty years earlier. Could it be that Courbet had a greater influence on this establishment Academician than his instructors?

Source photo for Day of Forgiveness in Brittany (above), 1886

Last Supper, 1895-96, Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret

Though flirting with Courbet Realism, Dagnan-Bouvert's work retains the Academic reliance on large scale and religious subjects. His Last Supper (above) solves the persistent problem of so many figures sitting at a single table by utilizing a "U" shape arrangement. Even in painting such a well-worn subject, the artist brings a fresh informality to the scene while establishing Christ's spiritual as well as His physical presence. This piece is interesting when contrasted to the much more intimate Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus (below), from 1896-97, which seems to have a much more ethereal quality. Seldom do we find a single artist having painted both scenes.

Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus, 1896-97, Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret.

So, was Dagnan-Bouveret an Academicia or a Realist? His fondness for religious and mythological subjects would place him firmly in the Academic tradition. His Lament of Opheus (below left) from early in his career (1876) is as Academic as they come. So too is his Pretty Artist at the Museum (below, right), though (unlike many of his peers) he did choose to paint her fully dressed. The first, however, is ancient, the second, contemporary, even to the point of challenging gender stereotypes. Despite the supposed Academic stranglehold over the Paris Salon, Dagnan-Bouveret's medal-winning works were as common in subject matter as peasant dirt. You could say he was an Academic Realist, but that presents some pretty perplexing contradictions--an artist trained by the likes of Cabanal and Gerome who lived to see the likes of Picasso and Braque before his death in 1929 at the age of seventy-seven.

Pretty Artist at the Museum,
Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret.

Lament of Orpheus, 1876,
Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret.

 

The Eiffel Tower

Gustave's Tower, the tallest thing in Paris.

Koechlin's first conceptual drawing,
1884. Notice his stacking of other 
Paris landmarks at right for height
comparison.

Did you know that Gustave Eiffel did not design the Eiffel Tower? I didn't. Although his company, was responsible for the design and the construction, the tower itself is merely named for him. The creative "head work" was done by three employees of Eiffel's engineering enterprise (below),  Maurice Koechlin and Émile Nouguier, later with the help of the firm's architectural department and  Stephen Sauvestre, who added various decorative touches, essentially, "humanizing" the engineering marvel. Built as the entrance centerpiece for the Exposition Universelle de 1889, and rising to a then record height of 1,063 feet (324 metres), it took from the Washington Monument the record as the tallest structure in the world. It was a record held for 41 years until the completion of the New York's Chrysler Building in 1930. Today over 250-million visitors have visited the most recognizable structure in the world.

 

Émile Nouguier,                  Maurice Koechlin,                       Stephen Sauvestre

Paris past and future,
conservatives and
progressives have always
been a fact of life in every
modern society. 

Such acceptance didn't come easily. Gustave Eiffel himself was said to have been lukewarm, at best, when presented the initial drawings (above, left), though he did sanction additional developmental work. The art intelligentsia of Paris were far less accepting. They hated the thing. Led by artists and achitects Adolphe Bouguereau, Guy de Maupassant, Charles Gounod and Jules Massenet, they presented a petition:

“We, the writers, painters, sculptors, architects and lovers of the beauty of Paris, do protest with all our vigour and all our indignation, in the name of French taste and endangered French art and history, against the useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower…imagine for a moment a giddy, ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a gigantic black smokestack, crushing under its barbaric bulk Notre Dame, the Tour de Saint-Jacques, the Louvre, the Dome of les Invalides, the Arc de Triomphe, all of our humiliated monuments will disappear in this ghastly dream. And for twenty years…we shall see stretching like a blot of ink the hateful shadow of the hateful column of bolted sheet metal”

The Eiffel Tower rises, 1887-89

The Paris cartoonist were
not kind.

Tell us how you really feel, boys! The "twenty years" refers to the fact that the Eiffel tower was originally intended to be a temporary structure. Imagine the art guys' outrage if they knew it would stand against their precious Paris skyline for at least the next 125 years. What the Paris art establishment came face-to-face with was the "future" boldly confronting the past. Even in Paris today, no building is allowed to rise above seven stories without a special (and rare) zoning variance. This law dates from before the time of elevators. Thus, to conservative Parisian eyes, the tower stood out like a sore thumb. However, Parisians adjust, just as they did to I.M. Pei's big glass pyramid in the hallowed courtyard of their Louvre. Eiffel countered criticism by emphasizing the pride the city would (should?) feel in the soaring symbolism of his proposed landmark, comparing it to the Egyptian pyramids (which suggests he had something more than twenty years longevity in mind).

The 1889 Paris World's Fair (as seen from this balloon photo)
came and went. Gustave Eiffel's tower stayed.

The Eiffel Tower was the star
of the show.

Twenty years came and went. The people of Paris came to love their "soaring thumb" and by 1909, the French government came to the realization the tower would make a pretty decent base for a radio antenna so any thoughts of dismantling it were postponed indefinitely. That was fortunate in that just five years later, a jamming radio transmitter atop the tower was responsible for disrupting German military communications to such an extent it, proved to be a major factor in the Allied victory in the First Battle of the Marne. During the next war, the tower was saved only because a German officer disobeyed Hitler's order to demolish the symbol of French National pride. In more recent years, daredevils have parachuted from the tower (one to his death) planes have flown beneath its arches, diners have paid exorbitant prices to dine at its restaurants, and on Bastile Day (July 14th) the tower becomes a pyromaniac's dream come true.

Las Vegas' Paris Hotel sports a scaled-down version of the Eiffel Tower

King's Island's "amusing" Eiffel Tower

Ironically, the structure the Parisians welcomed with some reluctance has become the subject of what we might call "tower envy." In the mid-1960s, the city of Montreal secretly negotiated a deal with then French President Charles De Gaulle to dismantle and move the Eiffel Tower to Canada to become the centerpiece for that country's Expo-67 World's Fair. The plan fell thru when the company operating the tower vetoed the deal out of fear the French goverment might not allow it to be rebuilt. Today, Las Vegas has an Eiffel Tower replica. Ohio's King's Island Amusement Park has a rather "clunky" looking version. Elsewhere in the world, cities such as Seattle, Montreal, Singapore, New York, Chicago, St. Louis all have "skyscraping" Eiffel Tower wannabes, which have long since surpassed Eiffel's creation in height, if not its graceful engineering beauty.

Even in 1889, Pointillist
George Seurat found the
Eiffel tower worthy of his efforts

The Eiffel Tower design lends itself to
all manner of souvenirs.







 

 

Richard Dadd

Come Unto These Yellow Sands, 1842, Richard Dadd

Portrait of the Artist, 1841, Richard Dadd

Quite a number of us over the age of sixty wouldn't be alive today without the "miracles" of modern medical advancements made just within our own lifetimes. I have a tiny metal stint in my heart that keeps a vital artery open and, along with a whole fistful of pills, keeps me alive and well and living to tell about it. Nowhere have the miracles of modern medicine been more "miraculous" than in the area of mental health. Have you ever heard of "bedlam?" The term comes from the abbreviated name of Bethlem Royal Hospital in London, the first medical facility in the world to seriously treat mental illness as something more scientific than "demon possession." Though founded as early as 1330, it wasn't until the 19th century that the institution became a virtual synonym for uproarious insanity. That was about the time the British artist and illustrator, Richard Dadd spent the final forty-two years of his life living and painting behind its locked gates.



Titania Sleeping, 1841, Richard Dadd--before insanity ensued.

Richard Dadd was born in 1817, two years before the queen, for whom was named the era in which he lived, worked, and struggled with congenital madness. He was born in Chatham, Kent, the son of a chemist. Young Richard was something of a child prodigy, admitted to the Royal Academy at the age of twenty and receiving a medal for drawing just three years later. He was the leading talent in a group of four artists including William Powell Frith, Augustus Egg, and Henry O'Neil calling themselves "The Clique." He painted the supernatural with infinite, almost surreal detail, which made him a favorite as an illustrator for the literary works that were quite popular at the time. His Come Unto These Yellow Sands (top), from 1842, is based upon a scene from Shakespeare's The Tempest.

Sir Thomas Phillips in Eastern Costume, Reclining, 1842, Richard Dadd

The exceptional talent with watercolors brought Dadd to the attention of the former mayor of Newport, Sir Thomas Phillips, who was planning an extensive tourist jaunt through Europe and around the Mediterranean. Richard Dadd would be his "camera." The group started in southern and eastern Europe moving down to Venice and Athens, then made its way through Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, and finally Egypt. Richard Dadd "took" pictures, painting his watercolor images during whatever moments he was not on the back of a camel, the principal mode of transportation at the time. As any hired artist would do on such a trip, the Dadd painted quite a number of images of Sir Thomas (above), often in Arabic dress, enjoying the "luxuries" of the Middle East.

Caravan Halted by the Sea Shore, 1842, Richard Dadd
--typical of his illustrations for Sir Thomas Phillips' grand tour.

Such a "grand tour," even today, would be something of an exhausting experience. In 1842, it was little short of devastating, especially for a working artist. Dadd began acting strangely while on a boat trip down the Nile. At first his patron chalked it up to heat stroke (a reasonable possibility, in sunny Egypt). As the group made it to Rome, Dadd was suffering paranoid delusion of being commanded by the Egyptian sun god, Osiris, to do battle with the devil. In Rome he was beset by the uncontrollable urge to attack the Pope. No longer able to blame Dadd's behavior on the sun (or its god), Phillips accompanied him to Paris where he was handed over to family and friends, who took him back to England and a period of "rest and recuperation." Today, Richard Dadd would have been diagnosed as manic depressive or bipolar. Two of the artist's brothers displayed similar, though less severe, tendencies.

Study of Eastern Heads and Figures, 1842, Richard Dadd

Fairy_Feller's Masterstroke, 1855-64
Richard Dadd.

Later, in the spring of 1843, convinced his father was the devil, Richard Dadd stabbed and killed him, then fled to France where, en route, he attempted to kill a fellow tourist with a razor. Apprehended by French authorities, Dadd was sent back to England where he was incarcerated in the criminal department of Bethlem Psychiatric Hospital for the next twenty years before being moved to a newer facility (Broadmoor) in 1863. Though he remained locked away under psychiatric care for the rest of his life, Richard Dadd continued to paint, his art considered by his doctors to be therapeutic. Indeed, works from this period are now considered by critics to be among his best, including his most well-known masterpiece The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke (left), painted between the years 1855 and 1864. The work now hangs in London's Tate Gallery. During this same period, he also created Contradiction, Oberon and Titania (below), as well as numerous portraits of his doctors and fellow inmates (bottom). He died at Broadmoor in 1886 at the age of sixty-five.

Contradiction, Oberon and Titania, 1854-58, Richard Dadd

Crazy Jane (detail), 1885, Richard Dadd, painted shortly before his death.





 

Rinaldo Cuneo

Town and Hills, Utah, 1937, Rinaldo Cuneo.
Okay, Cezanne would probably have left out the power line.

Rinaldo Cuneo Self-portrait, ca. 1900

Writers of all stripes sometimes like to play what I call "the game of if." For example, "if" the Confederacy had survived the Civil War, Woodrow Wilson would likely have become one of its presidents. Related to this "game of if" is what I call the "deadline headline" in which various political pundits, employ the words "if," "could," "might," or "may" aimed usually at scaring trusting or ill-informed readers. I usually skip such items. Very well, having said that, let me now demonstrate an artistic example of the "game of if." If Paul Cezanne had lived in California all his life, his paintings would have looked like those of Rinaldo Cuneo. That's what's called a thesis, by the way. Cuneo's Town and Hills, Utah (above), from 1937 looks very much like any number of Cezanne's many renderings of Mont Saint Victoire (below).

 

La Montagne Saint Victoire, 1885-95, Paul Cezanne. See the resemblance?



Belle View, France, 1913,
Rinaldo Cuneo 

Of course, any such proposition is tainted by the fact that Cezanne was probably an important influence, a pretty safe assumption in that Cezanne has likely influenced literally thousands of artists. And, inasmuch as the San Francisco native, Cuneo, studied for a time in Paris, the assumption is pretty safe in his case as well. Thus the comparison says as much, or more, about Cezanne as it does Cuneo. Yet, indications based upon Rinaldo Cuneo's student work such as his Belle View, France (left) from 1913, suggest that the artist was much more influenced by Impressionism or Pointillism than Cezanne's more fundamental search for visual structure. In fact, biographers seem to think his time studying under the American expatriate, James McNeill Whistler, had a much more dominant impact on Cuneo's mature painting style and palette.

Near San Anselmo, 1916,
Rinaldo Cuneo

Rinaldo Cuneo was Californian through and through, born in San Francisco in 1877, into an Italian-American family steeped in the fine arts. Two of his brothers also became artists, two sisters were involved in opera. The family was firmly middle-class, operating what we'd call today a travel agency, selling passages on steam ships. Even after studying at the local Mark Hopkins Institute of Art, then in London followed by Paris where he was a student of Whistler, Cuneo continued too work in the family business, taking time off to be a naval gunner during the Spanish American War. After the war, the last vestiges of Impressionism in Cuneo's work gradually faded away. His Near Anselmo (right) from 1916 looks nothing like his Untitled painting of Baker Beach (below) from the 1920s. His forms had become heavier, more solid, while his palette had darkened appreciably.



Untitled (Baker Beach near San Francisco), 1928, Rinaldo Cuneo

Still Life with Dahlias, Rinaldo Cuneo

Cuneo returned from Paris an Impressionist turned Tonalist before embracing Modernism. That's a good trajectory to get your work into major art shows and competitions, even into museums. It's not the best road toward living comfortably by selling your work. He established a studio about a block from his childhood home on Telegraph Hill with a great view of the city, which he frequently painted (below). He painted what we'd call today "local color" virtually all his life. Yet he was forced to make a living working on a tugboat for two full years (1916-17). During the 1920s Cuneo's work was critically well received and he was able to eke out a modest living as an artist as his reputation grew.




Cityscape, Rinaldo Cuneo. The degree to which the artist was influenced
by Cezanne is problematical, but Cezanne's type of Cubism is plainly
evident as seen from Cuneo's studio window.

Bay Area Hills, 1934,
Rinaldo Cuneo

Then came the 1930s, a time when Cuneo should have been in his prime as an artist, moving from local to national prominence. Instead, what moved to national prominence was the Great Depression. The stock market wasn't the only market that collapsed. People can't eat paintings. The WPA gave the struggling artist a break as he was invited to paint two lunette murals in the city's brand new Coit Tower landmark. However, even at that, he was just one several and his landscape paintings, such as Bay Area Hills (right), were not exactly outstanding as measured against the social realism of artists such as Ralph Stackpole, Bernard Zakheim, Clifford Wight, Edith Hamlin, George Harris, Otis Oldfield, Suzanne Scheuer, and Diego Rivera. During this period, Cuneo also taught classes part time on an irregular basis at the California School of Fine Arts.

Northern California, 1930, Rinaldo Cuneo. Expressionism had replace Impressionism.

Rinaldo Cuneo died in 1939 at the age of sixty-two, considering himself a failure as an artist.  He was not quite penniless but close, his studio packed with hundreds of unsold paintings. It wasn't until well after WW II, more than ten years after his death, that his work began bringing respectable prices. Sound familiar, Monsieur Cezanne?

Embarcadero at Night, 1928, Rinaldo Cuneo.



 

 



 

 

C. F. Gordon Cumming

Indian Life on Mirror Lake, Yosemite Valley, 1879, C. F. Gordon Cumming

Constance Gordon Cumming, ca. 1900

C. F. Gordon Cumming was something of an explorer, something of a writer, something of an artist, and most surprisingly, far more than "something" of a woman. She was all this between the years 1867 and 1924, during the height of the Victorian era, at a time when the mental image of the word "explorer" was totally male, and that of writer and artist predominantly so. Upper-class women such as Constance Frederica Gordon Cumming, traveling around the world at that time, did so only accompanied by their husbands. "Eka" (to her friends) Cumming had no husband. She had lots of wealthy acquaintances of both genders with whom she sometimes traveled and with whom she often visited for extended periods. She has frequently been termed intrepid, bold, dauntless, and fearless, which is redundant in the extreme, but perhaps necessary in describing such an exceptional woman.

 

Sydney Harbor, 1875, Constance Gordon Cumming

Constance Cumming was born, the youngest of twelve children, to a wealthy Scottish landowner and his wife in 1837. She grew up in Northumberland (northernmost England along the Scottish border) and was educated at Fulham in London. She taught herself how to paint and likely, to no small extent, how to write as well, inasmuch as young ladies at the time were only schooled in writing letters. Actually, most of her travel books are very much like letters home, journals, and what we'd call today, blogs. That is to say, despite having written and published some twenty-five books and articles, she was a much better artist than she was a writer. Even at that, her only instruction as an artist came from the English horse and dog painter, Sir Edwin Landseer, a friend of her father's.

 

The Great Hong Kong Fire, Christmas Day, 1878, Constance Gordon Cumming

Had the camera been a mandatory traveling accoutrement at the time, Constance Cumming might never have become an artist (a noted photographer, maybe). She began her travels by spending a year in India in 1867 (a British colony at the time). From there she moved on to other British colonies, Australia, then to Hong Kong. The British Empire pretty much wrapped itself clear around the world during this era. Arriving in Hong Kong on Christmas Day, she found herself becoming a witness to the great Hong Kong fire of 1878. Minus a camera, she painted a watercolor of it. From Hong Kong, friends urged her on to mainland China, Shanghai, Peking, and from there to Fiji, Japan, and Hawaii (also British at the time). Continuing her global jaunt, Miss Cumming next landed in San Francisco where she took to the hills and mountains of Yosemite, painting Indian Life on Mirror Lake (top). An intended stay of three days turned into three months. Her harrowing experiences in touring Yosemite on horseback demonstrates Cumming's unique flair for writing (notice, it's all one long sentence):

"The owners of the sure footed horses of the valley pride themselves on the fact there has never yet been accident, though hundreds of tourists who look as if they had lived all their lives in paved cities, and are wholly guiltless of any notion of riding, annually deliver themselves over to the guides, who place them on the backs of unknown ponies, arrange them in Indian file, and adroitly steer them up and down most fearfully dangerous trails, where one false step or stumble would probably land pony and rider right down in the valley in the form of a jelly."

The Great Wall of Peking, 1879, Constance Gordon Cumming

Quite apart from her travels, her writings, and her art, Constance Gordon Cumming is also remembered for her efforts in promoting the work of Scottish missionary, William Hill Murray, whom she met while visiting Peking. Murray had devised a method of teaching blind Chinese how to read by converting 408 Mandarin Chinese sounds to numerals. In 1887 she wrote a book, Work for the Blind in China: Showing How Blind Beggars may be transformed into useful Scripture Readers. A similar book followed in 1899, The Inventor of the Numeral-type for China, by the use of which Illiterate Chinese both Blind and Sighted can very Quickly be Taught to Read and Write Fluently. Though the  book titles may be as ungainly as her prose, Constance Gordon Cumming nonetheless maintained financial support for Murray's work until her death in 1924.

Temporary Chimneys and Fire Fountains, 1880, Constance Gordon Cumming. She was one of the first to paint Hawaiian volcanic activity, though the official date is suspect
unless the watercolor works were rendered sometime after she visited the islands.

 

Weird Art Materials

Fruit Loopy art.

Quiet elegant really...
for toilet paper.

Today, while waiting in one of my wife's doctors' waiting room, I noticed the abstract paintings on his walls, all, apparently, done by the same woman (I wish I could remember her name). In looking at them closer I noticed they were painted on various textured cloth stretched over canvas stretchers.  None were framed.  Upon still closer inspection I discovered that they weren't painted (not in the traditional sense, at least). Each "painted" stroke was actually thread sewn by machine, to look like paint on canvas. As far as I could tell, there was not one drop of paint on any of her pieces. 



Rachel Betty Case and her toenail and navel lint art.

I have long been a champion of art created from unconventional materials, as my loyal readers are quite aware. For the benefit of those not quite so loyal, I've written on food art, shell art, balloon art, car art, shrub art, not to mention any number of "off the wall" sculptural media. As I did a little research into the art I'd seen today, I began to realize that I'd barely scratched the surface when it comes to unconvenional art materials. Actually unconventional is a bit tame for what I've found. A better term might simply be, just plain weird. Anyone interested in art made from toenail clippings, hair, and belly button lint? Rachel Betty Case is. She sells tiny sculptural figures in tiny glass bottles (above). Okay, that's an extreme case.



St. Peter's in toothpicks. The pope would be proud.

In a more tasteful vein, Ryan Alexiev creates using Fruit Loops (top). Personally, I'm quite fond of Turkish artist Sakir Gökcebag's toilet paper art installations (above, left). When I taught school, I would often have students build sculptural works from toothpicks and Elmer's Glue. They were inexpensive, taught manual dexterity, structural fundamentals, eye-hand coordination, and best of all kept the little ones occupied for hours on end. None of them ever went as far as Stan Munro, however (above).

Care to guess the recycled art material here? (answer at bottom)

Artistic License (plates)

I'm a great advocate of recycling, and never more so than when items that would otherwise end up in a landfill somewhere, end up instead as works of art. The giant seashell (above) by Tom Deininger is quite fascinating but you might be well advised to display it in a well-ventilated area. He also makes cute little bunnies and giant "binkies" from the same material. The recycled license plates (right) not only make an important point as to art, but would, in fact, probably look good hanging over the couch.

All it needs is a string of lights.

Whether it's silver spruce of hubcaps (left) or used rubber gloves (plastic, actually) bent on making a fashion statement as designed by Sarah Bell Smith, recycled materials have the advantage of being plentiful, varied, and usually quite inexpensive.


Sarah Bell Smith's recycled gown.

To the opposite extreme, Olivia Hulme's colored pencil sculptures would be quite expensive to execute. High grade Prismacolors can run more than a dollar each. Even if they were sharpened, then cut to size, I'd hate to think how much she has invested in what she terms her "cluster" (below).

Clusters, Olivia Hulme

I could go on and on listing and posting weird art materials and the creations made using them. I've not even mentioned art utilizing drinking straws, push pins, thread and nails, bottle caps, M&Ms, toast, match heads, and other potentially lethal creative materials. The key element in each of these items is not the thing itself, whether or not it's recycled, its cost, or the skills needed to  raise it to the level of fine art. In fact, it's not even the finished product that counts most, but the idea, the mindset, the spark of genius which triggers all the rest. Now, I'm back to pondering what I might create out of all the errant cookie crumbs which keep muckin' up my keyboard.

The Mona Lisa is toast. The seashell mystery material is...cigarette butts.