Buttons, wooden doors and old fan blades may not be as common of materials as paint and clay in the art world, but artists Ann Brown and Richard Linn look to use these and more in their works.
“I’ve collected antique buttons for years,” said Brown, an artist who is a member at Starbrick Gallery. “When I retired a friend had given me a pin that had some buttons organized in different ways, and I thought to myself I have these buttons why don’t I try to make something. So I started making pins about two years ago and it took off from there.”
Both Brown and Linn are in the show “Repurposed” located at Starbrick Gallery, 21 W. Columbus St., Nelsonville, that continues through this weekend, comprised entirely of recycled materials.
Brown became a member of the gallery 18 months ago and said it is a wonderful place to collaborate with other artists.
“It’s a cooperative gallery,” Brown said. “(Which) means every member there works a couple days a month, we make decisions by consensus so it’s a group effort.”
Although certain pieces stick out among the crowd, for Brown it was difficult to choose just one to be her favorite.
“I have a book that I made of my pins and they’re like my children, each has a really different feel,” she said. “My deco ones are edgy and the Victorian ones are very pretty and more feminine, it’s hard to pick one as my favorite.”
Brown’s pins, bracelets and earrings vary in price, but she said most come out to around $50.
“They’re not cheap,” Brown said. “I don’t want to say that they’re expensive but the materials to make them are expensive. I hold some of my pins that are special to me back, but I’ve made over 400 pins and I’ve sold over 300.”
Though she does make bracelets and earrings, she said she mostly makes pins so people can convert them into necklaces if they want.
Brown also recently started making sun catchers out of old chandelier prisms, bookmarks out of old fan blades from the 1920s and key rings out of mahjong tiles.
Brown, as crafty as she is, doesn’t have a degree in fine arts. She received her degree in German and later became a registered nurse. She was also an administrator at Ohio University for 25 years and, on top of everything else, she organized her own business called Annabelle Designs.
“This hobby has surprised everybody,” Brown said. “Nobody thought that I was artistic at all. It was a fun surprise and it just started out from someone giving me a pin. I started doing one or two and it just began gradually, and it’s really relaxing and fun.”
Just like Ann Brown, Richard Linn had been doing a passion of his that inspired him to share it with others.
“I’ve been a wood worker for sometime,” said Richard Linn, an artist and a member of the Starbrick Gallery. “I’ve always been reusing old lumber because it’s always there and I hate to see landfills get filled. When you look at making a table out of a door,
you think to yourself there it is, I’m not using it, wouldn’t it be interesting to see what we could do with it.”
Parting with work that you put in so much effort and time is sad, but also rewarding.
“I just sold one that I really liked,” Linn said. “It was a jelly cupboard made entirely out of old wood. We’ve lived in this area for awhile now and I took down an old house to build a new one and I saved all of the old lumber, so when I finished the jelly cupboard it had looked like it was 200 years old and I just thought that was really cool.”
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