Part 2: Creating My Found Art!

By Chris Dunmire

After establishing my personal gallery on the Found Art! Web site, I began working on my art pieces. Over the course of two weeks, I created three unique works of "art" — painted and embellished from blank canvas items I picked up at a local Let's Learn store: two small books and a jigsaw puzzle.

During the process of creating each piece, I took advantage of the time to reflect on the purpose for the Found Art! project and hoped that my creative efforts would inspire someone in some small way. I truly enjoyed the process of creating for myself, whether or not the pieces turned out well enough to use in the experiment. The results of my artistic endeavors follow.

A Puzzling ARTifact

The nature of jigsaw puzzles fascinate me. It's like synergy: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Each piece, though small and seemingly insignificant by itself, comes together to form a bigger picture. In this case, an expressive painting. 

After "sponge" painting a colorful abstract design on the blank puzzle "canvas" with acrylic paint, I separated the pieces and decided to use them for a dozen Found Art! opportunities. Close up, each individual piece was itself a painted canvas to an artistic eye. See, I said that you didn't have to be a bona fide artist to do this!

Dream Journals

The blank books sparked an idea in me to create a journal-like object to be defined by the recipient. Since the inside pages were blank and durable, they were good for writing or for a variety of artistic expressions such as collage, drawing, or painting (the book sizes were 10.5" x 8.5" and 8.25" x 6.25").

I named both of the final book pieces Dream Journals after immersing the covers with colorful "impressionistic" dabs of paint. Then I created and glued a polymer clay heart accent to the lower corner of each cover and secured them with gold curling ribbon as a final touch.

With my art pieces done, I was ready to register them in my Found Art! gallery and "lose" them into the world.

Next: Part 3 — Losing My Found Art!

© 2004, 2008 Chris Dunmire. All rights reserved.