Man uncorks portrait of wife

Battle Ground: What better way to inspire romance than with wine … corks? Nathan Rebman was scratching his head, trying to figure out a crafty use for the wine corks that were piling up in his home. He finally saw a muse in his wife, Trisha, and recently unveiled a large mosaic of her face made with 2,862 corks. Like pointillism paintings that use distinct dots to create an image, Nathan’s artwork, “2862 Ways That I Love Her,” starts to take shape as the viewer steps back. The side-by-side corks are organized by shade to create definition of her facial features and the illusion of depth. It took about 36 hours to finish the ode to his wife, with plenty of starts and stops as he had to gather more corks of varying hues from friends and neighbors, and, eventually, buy some from the store. Since she is not a vain person, Nathan, a builder by trade, said it took a bit for Trisha to warm up to the project. That’s once she actually realized what image her husband had spent hours trying to capture. Now the mosaic of her smiling face hangs in the entryway of the couple’s Battle Ground home. “She saw it through a couple stages and still had no clue,” Nathan said.