Extra Buttons

44 "Extra Buttons" envelopes--saved by my mother

Bruegel: Paintings, drawings and prints, selected and introduced by Christopher Brown (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1978)

Made on 9" x 9" board for "One Night Stand," benefit at Art from Scrap, Santa Barbara.

Now owned by Mary Price 

Among other things, I inherited nearly 50 "Extra Button" envelopes from my mother. They all contained buttons, so I have those, too, but it was the array of these little vessels that appealed to me.

Our local Art from Scrap (title self-explanatory) has an annual fund raiser, and the rule this year was that the work had to be attached to a board nine inches square, provided by the management.

I decided to devote my mother's accumulation, my collection, via scrap to this artwork.

I thought of it as interactive—“Please flip the envelopes to find on the reverse my incisions into Bruegel, especially the grapple of life and death.

As it turned out, I did not realize that the work would have to hang vertical on the wall, so the Bruegel dimension went unseen, which is kind of right. There is in his art a deep awareness that the stuff of life lies within art in a way that you can sometimes only intuit.

I've tried to make a gif of this. I hope it works. Try clicking on it.