What: The tenth annual Recycled Arts Festival features 160 artists, information about recycling and waste, music and entertainment, and activities.
When: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. today.
Where: Esther Short Park, Columbia and West Eighth streets, Vancouver.
Cost: Free
On the Web: recycledartsfestival.com
Liz Wallace stopped and gazed at a window into wonder.
“I think it’s awesome: to take something that would normally be discarded and make stained glass out of it,” Wallace said.
What caught Wallace’s eye really was a window, salvaged from an old house and given a second life. Wallace, a Kelso resident, was standing in front of Darla Lynn’s booth Saturday afternoon at Clark County’s Recycled Arts Festival.
Lynn uses windows and similar items — including glass doors of old cabinets — as the frameworks for her pieces of art. Lynn, owner of Treasure Mosaics in Molalla, Ore., cuts pieces of discarded glass, including bottle bottoms and necks, into translucent circles and rings that form her designs.
What: The tenth annual Recycled Arts Festival features 160 artists, information about recycling and waste, music and entertainment, and activities.
When: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. today.
Where: Esther Short Park, Columbia and West Eighth streets, Vancouver.
Cost: Free
On the Web:recycledartsfestival.com
Lynn also can do custom work.
“I do heritage pieces,” Lynn said. In those projects, she uses glassware that might have been passed down from an aunt or grandmother.
“When you see them, you remember, ‘My auntie used to have that sugar bowl.’ “
Of course, these are fairly flat panels, so she can’t use the entire piece of glassware. It only works, Lynn said, if “they’re willing to let me cut it.”
Lynn was one of about 160 artists who are displaying their trash-into-treasure talents in the 10th annual art festival this weekend. The event concludes today at 4 p.m. at Esther Short Park.
Have a heart
There is a special feature this year: a competition to create a heart for the Tin Man that is the festival’s new mascot. Clark County’s Environmental Services department, which organizes the festival, has a ballot box at its booth.
The heart that draws the most votes will become part of the Tin Man for future festivals. The others will be donated to the American Heart Association for an auction next year.
Raw materials for the festival’s artists can be found in just about any recycling center, scrap-metal yard and garbage dump.
… Not to mention other locations where some artists meet their muse.
“I go to the beach too much,” Scott Klukas said. Some of the Camas artist’s creations reflect their origins as driftwood culled from the Columbia and Washougal rivers.
Another piece of his art uses weathered wood that used to be part of somebody’s fence. If he’s driving by and sees someone tearing down a fence, Klukas said, he isn’t shy about asking for a few pieces of scrap lumber. He throws it in the back of his vehicle. And that’s not a pickup.
“I have a Geo Metro hatchback,” Klukas said. “I hauled a 300-pound, 10-foot log home from White Salmon.”
Puget Sound-area artists Brian and Tara Brenno have their own specialties. He works in recycled glass; she uses aluminum cans, cutting them into pieces she assembles into mosaic-like images.
“I like to do birds, mainly,” she said.
No deposit
Their supply source?
“We go to the transfer station and take away instead of making a deposit,” Tara Brenno said. The waste-disposal officials at Vashon Island are OK with that, she added.
While this is the 10th recycled arts festival, at least one participant can trace her artistic heritage back 80 years and two generations. Denise Borgman of Amboy welds pieces of old farm and gardening equipment into metal sculptures.
“My grandpa made welded art in the 1930s,” Borgman said.
Borgman doesn’t have to go prospecting for her precious (precious to her, anyway) metals.
“They bring it to us. We buy it by the truckload,” Borgman said. “You don’t want to spend $32 driving around to buy three shovels and a rake. It’s not sustainable.”
