Mary Ellen Croteau Creates a Self Portrait with Thousands of Plastic Bottle Caps.

above: detail from CLOSE, a self-portrait of Mary Ellen Croteau made with plastic bottle caps

There seem to be an endless number of talented artists creating portraits using assemblages of unexpected items; licorice, junk, toys, pills, pencils, diamonds, pushpins and more. I have already featured nine different artists who create portraits from such items unusual work on this blog and now I'm introducing you to a tenth, Mary Ellen Croteau.

(click on each image below to see posts on each of these nine artists):



above: Top row. l to r: Bernard Pras' portrait of Bruce Lee, Zac Freeman's portrait of Garrett, Scott Blake's self portrait. Middle row, l to r: Jason Mercer's portrait of Kim Kardashian made with licorice vines, Christian Faur's portrait made of crayons, a diamond and sapphire gemstone portrait of Marilyn Monroe. Bottom row, l to r: Federico Uribe's portrait of a tiger made with pencils, Charles Manson made of rubik's cubes, and Eric Daigh's pushpin portrait.

Mary Ellen Croteau had been working with plastic bottle caps to create columnar sculptures, but while crafting these, she became compelled to create a large self-portrait with them.



She describes this inspiration below:
"Plastic bottle caps - like bags, a plastic product that can’t be/ isn’t recycled. I conceived of an “endless column” of these caps, after Constantin Brancussi’s (sic) iconic modernist sculpture. One became two, and two became many...:



...While making these columns, I noticed the smaller caps tended to nest inside one another, and the color combinations reminded me of Chuck Close’s painted portraits. So I got sidetracked and started on a large self-portrait made entirely of bottle caps. The piece measures 8 feet by 7 feet. No paint is used, except to delineate a few shadows where white board was showing through. In a few cases, the caps are trimmed in order to fit a tight space." - Mary Ellen Croteau



close-up of the nose:

close up of eye in progress:


The final assembled piece displayed for Art on Armitage:


Mary Ellen Croteau is an artist whose work directly addresses the absurdities of social norms, and lays bare the underlying bias and sexist assumptions on which our culture is constructed.
She lives and works in Chicago, IL.

See more of her unusual art here.

a shout out to This Is Colossal for bringing Mary's work to my attention

The American Flag Made of Toy Soldiers, Sneakers, Legos, Eyeglasses & More.

above: detail from Dave Cole's American flag made of melted toy soldiers and paint.

In honor of this year's Fourth of July, I'm sharing with you some artistic interpretations of the United States National Flag. However, I can't write a post on modern art and American flags without mentioning Jasper Johns, the artist whose modern paintings of American Flags are known throughout the world, the most famous of which is shown below:

above: Jasper Johns, Three Flags, 1959

Now, a selection of America's Stars and Stripes, aka Old Glory, as assemblages made with everything from Greek beach pebbles to bike chains.

American flag made of melted and painted plastic toy soldiers by artist Dave Cole:




American flag made of toy soldiers by Valerie Leonard:



American flag made of eyeglasses and ephemera by artist David Datuna:




American flags made of license plates by Aaron Foster:




American Flag made of Cooperstown baseball bats cut in half for wall mounting. Available here or on ebay:


Converse created American flags made of red, white and blue high-tops for several of their stores worldwide. The images below are from their Soho, Dusseldorf and Berlin stores:






American flag made of beach pebbles on the shores of Cyprus, courtesy of Hans2568:




Artist Cameron Gray has created mosaics of the American flag from oil paintings of food on 2 x 3 wood tiles. (and this one from erotic photography too graphic to show on this blog):




American flag made of reclaimed bicycle chains by ReGeared on etsy:




Giant Lego American Flags (for both the Nixon Library and Disneyworld):


above photo courtesy of mynico76 on flickr

above photo courtesy of Gotham Guy on flickr

above photo courtesy of Disney Dan on flickr

And lastly, I love these composites of modern chairs making up the American flag made by Design Within Reach and sent out as e-mails to their customers:



UPDATE! I just received this year's DWR flag composition made with Adirondack chairs and here it is:


Related links of interest:
• US Flag Rules and Regulations
• The Flag of the United States on Wikipedia
• A nice article by Kristian Goddard on the Resilience of the Stars and Stripes.
• A website dedicated to the U.S. Flag
• US Flags and Flagpoles

Forever may she wave. Happy Fourth of July!