Beautifully Worn Out
I like things with a little wear and tear, it’s true. The reason being is that things with dents, dings, scars, and worn out spots also have stories and usually interesting ones. It’s true that you can’t ask the worn down and beat up chair you find at the thrift store who had so neglected it but one can imagine what it might have been through including how it persevered through the years to sit there before you asking to be loved.
Patina is kind of like metal’s mark of perseverance. In the face of the many elements in our world, metals will persist, reacting to salt in the air or the acidity of water by producing an alternate finish. The metal loses some of its composition in the process and eventually this will break it down but it will hold out until the last and, in the meantime, we get to admire its struggle and the beautiful reactions that result from it.
I found this little piece of lively patina on the Flickr photostream of Christina Butler. It’s polymer with metal paints and patina solutions, similar to Swelligant. The patina represents something aged but then what kind of object would have layers so bent and twisted? What story did Christina have in mind when creating this? It shows disintegration with two perfectly round and shiny spots, as if saying that regardless of what has been lost, something beautiful will always survive. Well, that’s the start of my story for it at least.
Speaking of stories … you may note that Christina has been quite inactive on Flickr and her Etsy shop has been on vacation since 2014. Sometimes our artists just fade off and we can only guess at what happened in their lives to move them away from the art we see. But in Christina’s case, we actually do know. She and her partner Jay took over daily operations at Poly Tools in 2014, a company her mother started in 1999. Not shutting down the shop tells us that she has not given up on her own art work but has a lot of focus elsewhere. Luckily, we can still catch up with her on Facebook when not detoured by the offerings over at the Poly Tools website.
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