Cult Modern

The entire portrait was made up of roughly 5,000 bottle caps collected over a 5 year period. Some come from as far away as Africa, and most of them from family and friends who despite the uncertainty of their use saved them for me anyway.

Somewhere between my Wisconsin upbringing and my designer training I found that I really enjoyed drinking different beers from around the world. Often times select them based on their labels or bottle caps,  resulting in me starting to save some of the cooler looking bottle cap I would find. Before I new it I had began to amass what I thought was a fairly large collection, and I thought it might be cool do something with them. I laid them out on the table one day and came to the realization that the 350 or so bottle caps I had collect was really rather an unimpressive number. I new I needed way more if I was going to do anything with them, so I began picking up bottle caps at every chance I could get, often leading to strange looks from friends, family and strangers as they watched me shove a collection of bottle caps in my pocket at a neighborhood cookout or family gathering. But before I knew it I had a few dozen friends and family that took notice and were now greeting me with a bag of bottle caps for my collection each I would see them.

Then this past summer I sorted through my now very large collection of bottle caps and grouped them into categories based on color, and decided that now (5 years or so from my first little interesting bottle cap that I set aside) I had a large enough collection to do something. Plus, I had a nice 47″x 47″ pieces of Baltic Birch Plywood lying around that was calling for something to be done with it. I determined that I was going to do a portrait and that a self-portrait probably offered the least risk of offending someone if it didn’t turn out quite the way I had envisioned. So after working on and off  over the past 3 months I finally completed it this past weekend, and I’m very pleased with the result. Of the many art pieces I’ve created over the years, both commercial and private, I found this to strangely be one of the most satisfying. I don’t know if that was because the material had come from so many people and place and each piece had it’s own story, or if it was because there was something incredibly tactile and cathartic about selecting and smashing each bottle cap for just the right place in the piece. Whatever the reason it felt very rewarding and I’m ready to do another—I just need to get some more bottle caps.