Home

Thursday, September 20, 2012

Sons of Buttinsky

Sons of Buttinsky


This piece was started in March when I attended ArtFest.  Orly Avineri was teaching a postcard class using recycled materials, a class that I loved by the way!  I did not finish the piece until this week as I had put the background aside.  Well a happy mistake occurred when all the right pieces were found.  The mistake was the background or so I thought.  But wait, the planets must not have been aligned or maybe it was that I had not found the right collage materials yet. 

I had been thinking about how there are times when I am driven and no matter what I push forward somewhat like a determined elephant.  I do not know where most of my ideas come from, but they have been very fruitful of late and so I just go with it.  This is what happened with Sons of Buttinsky.  I found some ephemera recently at a fleamarket.  A postcard had some great messages on it and an amazing silhouette.  (These will show up in a later collage I am sure. )  I just love the Sons of Buttinsky, ancient, reckless, and independent.  Then the elephant showed up as I was cleaning up my studio desk as did the moth and the hand.  It all just started to flow together, but I had to find something to finish off the piece and thus the butterfly that had been sitting right in front of me for weeks made it complete.

The message on the fleamarket postcard find was intriguing.  Upon reading the message I found the person who had received a postcard was not sure who had sent it.  This person sent this postcard to whom they thought was the sender with a message to make sure that in the future initials were added to the postcards so that the receiver would know who had sent it.  It sounds so clandestine to be reading something from strangers and now using the find in a new way.

2 comments:

tgarrett said...

Hey John,
I really love this piece- how big is it? What great variety and great composition!

Brian Kasstle said...

Hi John! This really is a great piece! I just received it in the mail from you! Hopefully you'll have some "male" in the post soon! ;-)