Spotlight on Jan, HungryHoller

I've met someone wonderful people during my bottle cap journey.  We've laughed together, traded bottle caps and stories, and marveled at our commonalities.  Jan, from Hungry Holler, has been a true joy getting to know.  With each email exchange, she has shared glimpses of her work, and each one has astonished me and brought true joy to my mornings.  Jan also has a video on YouTube and I strongly encourage you to watch it.  She shows how she creates her incredible gourd art pieces.  It is my great pleasure to share her story with you.

Journey

[Painting by Jan's father, Arthur Mohr, of her husband]

My Dad is an accomplished artist, not professionally. Art has been a part of my life ALL my life. And not just as in painting, sculpture etc. My folks landscaped artfully, built barns and corrals artfully. Purchased art. Stuff they pointed out to us made us think artfully. All that stuff adds up. As a child, I loved to color and make the holiday centerpiece. I don't know what inspires me. I don't know what motivates me. Creating is just something I do. Nothing deep. Nothing profound. I can't help it. I often don't know what the heck I'm doing, but I just blunder in and most of the time, it works out pretty well. It could be I'm master of nothing. Perfection is boring. I love the odd turns creation takes. Sometimes it's irritating. Sometimes it's downright fabulous.

I'm self-taught, with input from family over the years. They know their stuff and I respect their opinions, but when it comes down to it, I pay attention pretty much only to my ownself. I've struggled all my life with two warring hemispheres of my brain: bohemian vs beancounter. My degree is in history. I thought I'd go to law school. The universe thought otherwise, thank goodness. Obsession is partnered with discipline in that if you're driven to do something, you do it. It's the other part of your life that can fall apart. The beancounter in me hasn't permitted that. The mundane is important to me too. I don't like sitting down and doing paperwork, but I dislike the fallout from not doing it even more. My studio can look like a whirlwind went through it, but my kitchen is clean. And I know where everything is in my studio even though it doesn't look like there's order to the chaos.

Jan and I share a beancounter background and that personality conflict.  Each time I allow one side to overrule the other, which I often do, the imbalance is palatable and immediate.  For me I tend to swing wildly between both and I have great admiration for Jan's ability to stay at the crest of the wave.

Bottle Cap Nirvana

I Heart Coffee

My bottle cap and pull tab work has become an obsession second only to my long-time gourd obsession. I love upcycling/recycling industrial dross. The combination of the organic and the manufactured delights me. Go figger. Hungry Holler Art Center (the grandiose-sounding name for our 6 acre home place, studios, gallery and pasture) is full of industrial stuff created for one purpose, reincarnated as art.  There's something to see everywhere you look.

 

 I'm a gardening fiend and again, the juxtaposition of the organic with iron is so appealing. I do believe there's a pattern here! Obsession is critical to creation. If obsession doesn't drive you, you don't get stuff DONE. Living on a small old farm also is very freeing. I can bottle cap my living room walls and know it's an improvement over yucky painted paneling. 

 

This shot (on the left) of Jan's wall showcases Cynthia Reddish's Road to Hell picture.  As you know, I love Cynthia's picture and am in awe at Jan's bottle cap wall.  In Jan's window surrounds (on the right), the caps look like mosaic glass and I love the raw wood framing.  I have visions of a lovely day spent with these incredible artists doing the same treatment on my bar downstairs.  Beer, conversation, cement all sounds like a wonderful way to spend the afternoon.  I'd always imagined someday putting tile on that ugly old bar...but the bottle caps....WOW, great idea.

You can learn more about Jan and see more of her artwork on the following sites:

HungryHoller
Etsy
Blog

YouTube

Spotlight on Karyn, Somewhathip

The featured artist this week is Karyn who sells her colorful, hand painted bottle caps in her shop, SomewhatHip.  Karyn is a self taught artists who experiments in many media, including pencil, paint, ceramic, paper and computer graphics.   In her own words, Karyn describes her background and inspirations that led to these fabulous pendants:


A Shop is Born
I'm currently working on my Ph.D. at the University of Toronto, where I do cancer drug delivery research with a lab that makes new materials for medical applications. Although I'm studying engineering, I like to indulge my artsy side.  When my friend Rio introduced me to Etsy, I was immediately hooked.  Curious about my shop name? A few years ago, an employee of the school of graduate studies contacted my supervisor to ask for recommendations for students to star in a recruitment video for UofT. The selection criteria - "we're looking for graduate students who are photogenic, articulate, and somewhat hip." Apparently I fit the bill, and the rest is history...


Journey

I like to create things that people don't see every day. For me, the best part about handmade items is their uniqueness - a quality that can never be mass produced. I'm inspired by many offbeat things. I would say I got my start in grade 8 art class, where I first produced a portrait of a girl that actually looked like the girl - by drawing a grid on the original, and drawing each square while blocking out the rest of the sketch. I also learned a lot about form in a high school drafting class. This taught me about proportion and perspective. I also learned a lot about sketching through biology classes by looking through a microscope and sketching without seeing the page. I've also been designing personalized Christmas ornaments for my friends and family for the past 15 years, using fabric paint and a curved surface, which has given me speed and a more practiced and steady hand. And to prove that inspiration really does come from everywhere, the original idea to paint names and designs onto Christmas ornaments came from watching Days of Our Lives in high school. I'm almost embarrassed to share that... 

My latest obsession is collecting up our bottle caps after drinking with friends, and transforming them into miniature pieces of art. Each of my bottle cap pendants is painted freehand. They were originally inspired by a pendant my sister bought me for my birthday, which was a hand decorated domino. I thought it was pretty amazing that it still retained so much of its original form, even though it had been completely transformed. I'm also collecting some beautiful and unique stones and beads to launch a wire wrapped jewelry line, which is coming to my shop very soon.

Inspiration

I'm inspired by a diverse set of things. I am greatly influenced by color. Sometimes I just mix paints or think about color combinations and think about how I can use them together. Song lyrics often capture my attention, and I will think about what they mean to me, and how they translate visually. I am also highly influenced by things that I see. I'm an avid amateur photographer, which is a hobby that trains you to focus on objects that normally go unseen or unanalyzed. I'm usually the only person that people know who has broken cameras because of too many shutter actuations. Usually the image count (beginning with 0001) has to reset itself 2 or 3 times before it gets to this point.

 

The events that have triggered designs are fairly disconnected. The sliced kiwi was inspired by a mural in a fast food restaurant in Barcelona called Pans, that had many foods in cross section. The goldfish was a request from my other sister, and so I drew him based on a pet goldfish we used to have. The water lily is based on a marsh boardwalk in Point Pelee national park, which is the southernmost mainland tip of Canada. The dragon is a portrait of a kite I purchased in a market in Bali, after my best friend from Vancouver got married in Singapore. The cherry blossom design is one I made for my best friend in Toronto, who really admired blocky industrial pendants we saw in a courtyard in Montreal. My mom also helped me a lot by giving me her signature paint brush many years ago - it's the thinnest brush I own, as it is normally used to sign a name on a painting, so it demands precision and fine lines - I'll bet she never guessed what I'd ultimately use it for.

 

I recently purchased one of Karyn's bottle caps to use in my next design.  I'll share more about how Karyn's and other artists in this series influenced my design in a future post.  Karyn's pendants are even more stunning in person.  If you'd like to learn more about Karyn and see more of her work you can find her at:

SomewhatHip.com

Twitter

Spotlight on Loran Scruggs

(Music by Eric Beug and Boolar. Animation by JuliaPott)

This video, produced by Eric Beug, for Etsy's Handmade Life series, is an excellent introduction to Loran Scruggs. It's not often we get to see an artist working in her studio and describing her process in her own words. Loran shared the following with me:

I graduated with a BFA from the California College of Arts (and Crafts). I went there with the idea of learning how to make things but, even at that point when the college still had ‘Crafts’ in its name, it was more of an Arts school. The focus was on the artist's intent; who is your audience, where to display your work, the why more than the how was emphasized by my instructors. I often wonder what it would have been like to go to a Craft School.

Whistles on Chains

I've always wanted to make things; my earliest piece was a dragon fly made out of candy wrappers. My parents were supportive, allowing full access to the tape dispenser and making things progressed from there. I’m motivated by the puzzle ‘what can I make with what I have at hand? For example I’ll ponder Hunt’s tomato cans...tin cans are sharp…I cut myself... Hunt’s..red… hunt cut sharp... Oee, I know I’ll make a Hunting Knife out of Hunt’s tomato cans. Usually with a lot more threads that don’t finish into anything.

 Pendant Floral Yellow Chamber Rattle

Port Townsend, where I live, is a small town with a food co-op and a large arts community. Many people here are into the simple life, living off the grid, reusing and recycling. I graduated from art school with a strong interest in creating with what I had at hand as well as not using heavy machinery. My art work reflects my values as well as that of my place."

I've enjoyed this peek into the work of Loran Scruggs.  Before we leave her, I'd like to share one of her toy creations.  I found these very intriguing.   This is collaboration at it's finest.  The wooden camel hand crafted by Etsy artist, Oopsthatsart, is beautiful on it's own.  Loran takes that same camel and creates her own work of art that still serves it's original intent as a child's toy.  The buyer benefits from the work of two fine artists in one piece. 

"When I first saw Oopsthatsart wooden toys, I purchased one hoping the wooden wheels would fit inside a bottle cap. When they did, I was so pleased I contacted Lisa at oops..and she wrote back saying that they could do any custom order animals or shapes if I had any ideas. I immediately thought about the Tiger Balm tins and a tiger that I wanted to make using the tins as wheels (they fit over the wooden wheels as well) and so began a great relationship."

Little Wooden Camel by Oopsthatsart 

Toy Camel Tropical Theme by loranscrugss

A great relationship indeed.  Next week we'll meet Karyn from Somewhathip.  If you'd like to see more of Loran's work or Oopsthatsart's work you can click on their names anywhere in the post or see their shops at:

Loran Scruggs on Etsy
Oopsthatsart on Etsy

Spotlight on Cyndia Reddish

 

It's my great pleasure to introduce the first follow-up article on artists previously highlighted in my series on bottle cap art.  Cyndia Reddish is a self-taught metalsmith, jewelry artist and photographer.  She is well known for her art jewelry and her photography has won numerous awards in the Montana State fair.   Cyndia shared the following with me during our discussions:

"Art is in my soul. In the twenty years that I have been a professional jewelry artist, I have felt the ever-present conflict between my conservative side of myself and my wild bohemian side, the gainfully employed adult versus the artistic free spirit. I constantly see dichotomy in the world around me as well as within myself; I see beauty in objects that create a sense of uneasiness, even fear in others. For me there is a concurrent sense of balance, a yin/yang, within the inherent conflict of perceptions.

After moving to Montana in 2006, I found myself becoming creatively restless, wanting to reach deeper and unleash a more primal nature, a grittier creativity. By using my art to provocatively confront the uncomfortable feelings that force us to stare at a train wreck even though we want to look away, I feel that I am fulfilling an important aspect of my divine purpose, to touch people and change them in some way that they otherwise might not have achieved alone. 

Photography

I have always been intrigued with provocative photos that draw you into the scene, that capture a moment in time and convey the mood in a way that sticks with the viewer and provokes contemplation.  Taking pictures of everything helps me to remember my past and my trips to other places.  Macro-photography is my personal favorite venue, and many of my photos depict unusual close-up views, such as the inside petals of a lily, or a water droplet reflecting the landscape from a barbed wire fence.  With my photograph (on the left), Road to Hell, I took a low-angled shot of a bar parking lot full of rusted bottle caps to try to capture the intimation of a deteriorating life of an alcoholic."

[This picture spoke to me in many ways.  First the title reflects so clearly my husband's joking view of my bottle cap obsession.  He is very supportive, but he couldn't help but laughingly say "road to hell is right."  It also is a strong connection for me to the other artists in this series.  When I saw this picture, I saw the friends I've made through this very unique piece of discarded metal.  I saw art and friendship waiting to happen.  Cyndia took this shot outside a redneck bar in Okema, Oklahoma.  The sign outside the bar reads, "Rocky Road Tavern, Home of Woody Guthrie and the Common Folks, God Bless America."]

Jewelry

Cyndia has two jewelry lines, Black Water Siren Studio and Traeshe.  Her handcrafted art jewelry studio has been in business since 1989  and was featured in Femail Creations, a national gift catalog showcasing female designers.  The earrings on the right, Kyrah Arrowhead, are an example of the craftsmanship you will find in her studio.  Cyndia describes her shop, Traesche,  as "Outsider art for the Alter Ego."  She has this to say about her newest line:

"In my latest conceptual jewelry series, the Bullet Hole CollectionTM, I capture an iconic symbol of violence (the bullet) in its precise moment of impact (the hole).  I use what is physically not present to convey movement and action, to tell a story of inference, like using an echo rather than the voice itself.  In doing so, I create an unsettling beauty in my jewelry with what many would consider to be an alarming, but very unique, choice of subject matter.  Notches on the Post by Traeshe.

It was my pleasure to get to know Cyndia through her artwork.  You can find Cyndia Reddish in select boutiques throughout the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom or at these on-line locations:

BlackWaterSiren.com

BlackWaterSiren.etsy.com

ReddishGallery.etsy.com

Traesche.etsy.com

blackwatersiren.blogspot.com

ebay username:  blackwatersiren

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