Artist's Statement Dec. 2007
by Carolyn Hasenfratz

I am either blessed or cursed with a condition that most if not all artists can probably relate to - I constantly look at found objects I encounter in the course of living my life and fantasize about ways to make them into art. This is a blessing because it makes whatever environment I happen to be in a lot more interesting than it might normally be. And it's a curse because over the years I've collected a lot of weird things that I don't want to discard in case one of these days I get inspired to actually use the objects according to my original ideas, which are recorded in my numerous sketchbooks or just carried around in my head.

For several months in 1989, when I was still a student, I worked at the Central Hardware store on Page Ave. in Overland, Missouri. My departments were Paint and Hardware. As you can imagine, I had myriad opportunities at such a job to think of ways to make the things I saw around me into art. I made beads out of Durham's water putty. I made jewelry from nuts, washers, chain, and clear plastic tubing. I incorporated concrete and cast plaster into my design class projects. Like most artists I get exited by seeing selections of colors, and you can imagine how the paint chip cards in the Paint department sent me into sensory overload. Sometimes we threw away boxes of old paint chip cards when the paint vendors sent us new, updated ones. Could I bear to throw all of those away? Of course not! So I took a couple of boxes of them home with the intention of making a geometric paper mosaic from the chips. I've always been attracted to grids and modular designs, so it seemed like a fun idea to me. Then as now I have way more ideas for projects than I can ever do, and that particular project was one of many that did not get done at the time.

I've changed residences many times since then, and at each move I had a decision to make - accept the fact that I'll never do anything with the paint chips, or take them with me just in case. Each time I saw the chips, I remembered the original idea and still liked it, so I made the decision each time to take them with me.

Besides serving as a fun color exercise which I always enjoy, the resulting collage made in December 2007 is intended to show an abstract representation of a period of time. Carrying over colors from one block to the next is a way of illustrating how we carry bits of the past with us, figuratively in memories of good and bad things that have happened, and sometimes literally as in the boxes of paint chips I dragged around with me for 18 years.

The texture you see on parts of the collage was applied with the rubber stamp Textures Unmounted with Ancient Page rubber stamp ink, which is archival and fade resistant.

Newsletter

Would you like to sign up for my newsletter so you can be notified when I have new products, articles, project ideas, or news to share with you?