Month: March 2005

     In December 2004, I was forwarded the following article about a fellow bottlecap mosaicist. I’ve pasted the relevant bits of the now-unavailable-online article below. The fulltext of the article, which was published in North Carolina this past November, is preserved for posterity here. The only other reference to this artist’s bottle cap work I’ve found is to her appearance as a guest on this North Carolina Talk Radio show. There don’t appear to be any images of her bottle cap art online. I’m posting this in the hopes that the artist will stumble across this site when searching for their own name, and send me some photos.

‘Pop’ art: If the cap fits, paint it
By Catherine Brennan Hagood

     Need to quench your thirst for some refreshing art? Molly B. Right is celebrating “pop” culture by using old soda bottle caps, Liquid Nails and metal backgrounds in place of traditional oils and canvas.

[…]

     Right’s bottle-cap mosaic series is a foray into the pop-art world with an Old World twist. Her more traditional subject matter completely contradicts the nature of the commercial-oriented world of soda, yet the complex pieces of artwork blend together like cherry and Coke.

     Right’s renderings of the Mona Lisa, the Virgin Mary, plus many others are created with layered bottle caps (some rusted, some completely new), and are thoughtfully glued on her metal canvas.

     The images might then be touched up with a bit of paint, but the bottle caps are often untouched, leaving the Mona Lisa with soda-pop logos all over her face.

[…]

     “I realized how big my paintings were going to be when I used a single bottle cap for the pupil of an eye. I built the eye around the pupil and realized that my finished product was going to be really big,” Right says.

     Fortunately for her, Right located the owner of an old bottle cap factory and was able to buy the caps by the thousands.

     She actually primes some of these caps by “rusting” them in her back yard before applying them to her artwork. The rusted caps allow for a variation in the color, which lets her add shaded elements or color changes to her pieces.

     “I put some of the caps in my yard for a while to let them rust, otherwise they would all look brand new,” she says.

     Other bottle caps are used in pristine condition, such as a black bottle cap with a small, white polar bear logo used for a pupil with a twinkle in the eye.

     Right’s final mosaic images are awe-inspiring because of the amount of difficulty in creating something well-rendered with such a difficult medium.

     I also recently received a nice email from yet another fellow bottlecap mosaicist, who pointed out the existence of several other artists active in the cut-throat world of bottle cap art:

Hi Adam,

     Your bottle cap mosaic is really stunning… and I appreciated the links to other artists as well. Like you, I thought I was the only one doing this kind of thing, but I’m not all that surprised to find myself wrong on that count.

     I’ve been doing bottle cap mosaics over the last few years and would love it if you included a link to them on your page. Check them out here. The bottle cap pieces are in the second row from the top.

     A few other links to other artists who do great bottle cap work:

Remi Rubel (link, link)

Ross Palmer Beecher (link)
Rick Ladd (link)
Antique and folk art using bottlecaps (link, link)

     Sorry to hear about your brother, but I’m also glad to see that you’ve found such great ways to memorialize him, both with the artwork and the scholarship. Best of luck with everything,

John

     You can view my bottle cap mosaic here.