Whimsical Folk Art

This farm scene was painted on a hardwood sign board that had beautiful scalloped corners and beveled edges all the way around. Many years ago, my aunt and uncle lived on a farm in Ohio. Occasionally, my family and I would visit them and these memories inspired this folk art painting.

Folk art describes a wide range of objects that reflect the craft traditions and traditional social values of various social groups. These art works from 'common folk' are generally produced by people who have little or no academic artistic training, nor a desire to emulate "fine art." In the collectibles and antique industry, these items are categorized by established techniques and styles of a particular region or culture. Along with painting, sculpture, and other decorative art forms, some also consider utilitarian objects such as tools and costume as folk art.

Characteristically folk art is not influenced by movements in academic or fine art circles, and, in many cases, folk art excludes works executed by professional artists and sold as "high art" or "fine art" to the society's art patrons. On the other hand, many 18th and 19th century American folk art painters made their living by their work, including itinerant portrait painters, some of whom produced large bodies of work.

Other terms that overlap with folk art are naïve art, Pop art, outsider art, traditional art, "self-taught" art and even "working class" art. As one might expect, all these terms have different connotations; but they are all at times used interchangeably with the term folk art, for which a satisfactory definition has proven hard to come by.

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We call these plaques crazy cool cats because they have a very 50s looking style. They're made of plaster and we painted them with acrylic paints, although traditionally they were spray painted when originally produced. These were very popular for us on eBay in the early 90s.

This lion head which measures about 13" x 8" was made using some of the junk advertising newspapers that we receive at home during the week. We just used a traditional paper mache paste that you might remember using in school made of flour and water and a little salt to prevent the paste from getting moldy. I used four layers of paper to make it. The lion head mold we used was for a cement lion head used in garden statuary. It was painted with multiple latex acrylic paints to create a faux iron patina to create a rustic look.

This Computer Folk Art was created using canvas board painted with acrylics and fabric paints to create the intricate lines. Recycled Micro processors were used as spiders and glass stones were used to create this piece. The name of the painting is World Wide Web.

This tile piece was made from a tile mold for plastercraft. What I did was take a roll of paper towels that had accidentally gotten wet, and instead of throwing it away, I shredded it into pieces, put it in my craft blender, added white craft glue, and created a paper mache paste, which I then poured into the mold (instead of plaster). It took a little longer to dry (about a day extra), but I made four of these from the recycled roll of paper towels (instead of using plaster), which made them much lighter and not as fragile like plaster. Painting these pieces was a breeze just using regular craft paints. I used the metallic acrylic paint in the middle, used the watered down base greenish patina which I patted down using a wet towel. Once the paint was dry we moge poged the piece, which seals it and gives it a shine. These pieces came out very light, which made them very versatile to use in any other art or easy to hang on a wall, even using velcro. This makes a great craft project for children. We also used a lot of vintage molds that we still have to create other pieces, like figurines and wall plaques using the same technique. So next time you have a roll of paper towels that get wet, don't throw them away, get crafty with it.

This beautiful angel is made of Plaster of Paris using a cement mold used for garden decor.

This was made from the same mold we used to make the paper-mache lion above.