This Other Work I Do Sometimes

If you’ve followed my blog for very many years you might have seen an image or two like the above. I used to call these nail collages before they involved buttons. But the term ‘button mural’, was coined by the good people at Busy Beaver who make the buttons, and it seems to be sticking. This piece is new. I just installed it in March, North of Chicago in a private home. Below I’ll write a bit about the process, and the history of this very un-comics-y side gig.

These button murals are an outgrowth of work that I started doing as an undergrad art student back in the mid 1990’s when I was at the University of New Mexico studying painting and thinking I was going to be an installation artist… or something. My thesis exhibition before I graduated in 1996 consisted mostly of a collection of tiny cut-up found images glued onto the heads of nails in large swirls or clusters, much like the above. In the few years that followed I ended up gravitating away from that work and got serious about making comics, which I’d never entirely stopped doing despite more grand ambitions.

But then sometime in 2001 or 2002 I was working as a cook at Lula Cafe when a friend there suggested I do some sort of art project with buttons – he was moonlighting at Busy Beaver, a button manufacturer in the neighborhood. Seeing a connection with the nail collage work, I agreed. I ended up printing large-scale photos of views and people in and around the restaurant, cutting them up into one-inch circles, turning them into buttons and creating a series of giant clusters on the restaurant’s walls by sticking the button’s pin-backs into the wall. Patrons were invited to take the buttons, and so little by little the installation was meant to disappear. I would periodically place little red dots over the holes that were left – like those used in galleries to indicate that an artwork is ‘sold’. It sort of worked. There were far too many buttons for the occasional interested patron to make much of a dent, but people seemed to respond to it. Not too long afterward Lula commissioned a permanent piece when the restaurant expanded into the space next door, and then a few years later they requested another one after a kitchen renovation. Over the next decade or so I ended up getting more commissions, trickling in every few years. One for a child’s bedroom, a gigantic 10,000-button piece at Ogilvy’s offices downtown. Lambda Legal and The National Resources Defense Council commissioned pieces for their offices, and a few others here and there.

It’s a funny sideline. It feels sort of magical that the work has continued to have a life completely outside any effort on my part to push it forward – and that it really seems to speak to people. But there is a way that it can feel a little like the product of almost an entirely other mind. I was 21 or 22 when this stuff bubbled up out of collage and found-object work I was doing in school. Now I’m 47 and that guy feels like a very different person and artist. More than one client has been very confused when they try to track down the button collagist online and keep running into this weird cartoonist person.

I hadn’t done a new piece since 2014 or so, so it felt very out-of-the-blue to get an inquiry from someone in Chicago again asking about a commission. The clients are a couple who are both well-established in the ad world in Chicago, and had both at one time worked at Ogilvy, which is how they found me. They just built a new house in Wilmette, just north of the city and wanted a piece reflecting their life and history installed in their bedroom. They hadn’t moved in yet, but the house was more or less furnished, so, given the covid situation, I stayed there on my own for about ten days, going through the many many family pictures and various objects and artifacts they had left me to work with. Given the long distance between LA where I now live, and Chicago, I planned to do the entire process, start-to-finish in a single trip. I spent the first two days scanning photos and and cutting up children’s clothing and artwork and various other objects of a family’s life. Then I took everything to Busy Beaver to begin the manufacturing of the buttons, went back to Wilmette and started putting nails in the wall. After a day or two I had buttons in hand and over the next week, of mostly 10-12 hour days, the piece took shape, little by little.

Getting that deep into a process is, I guess, a good way to channel another mind, even if it is a quarter century removed. But the subject matter also ended up feeling meaningful to me in a new way. Maybe you can’t spend twenty hours paging through the objects and pictorial history of a family without starting to feel a connection, but it began to feel sort of profound, in a way, to be creating a piece like this for a family at a moment of real transition – aside from the move, they have one child in college in another state, the other about to finish high school and leave as well. And it’s what they will be looking at every day when they wake up as long as they end up living there. The fact that they let me directly cut up their kids baby clothes also really added something. The variance of textures and the bright pinks and yellows and magentas of the clothes and the kids artwork added something very light and new to the work. It is made of images of things, but also of actual things. And those colors of fabric and paint are really not reproducible by any printer working from CMYK.

The way I work is to just start adding buttons and then watch to see what sort of structure or pattern might start to emerge. One of the clients has a collection of playing card Jokers, and one of these was circular in shape. So I used that as a centerpoint, around which everything else would expand and revolve. After a while a dark colored swirl began to emerge around a lighter center, and so in the last few days I emphasized that structure and created a brighter arm curving down below out of the cut-out clothes and paint, and a few other brighter pieces.

There were also a couple of children’s books I cut up and incorporated. You might be able to identify a few of those, The Giving Tree, Where the Wild Things Are and Goodnight Moon.

Many thanks to the clients, as well as Anna Cerniglia of Johalla Projects and Busy Beaver for making the piece happen.