Consumer Culture Eyesores Rendered Eye-Catchingly Beautiful

Back in grade school, do you recall how joyful it was to cultivate your inner artiste, way before you even knew what the words "Hey kid, you better stick to studying..." meant? Remember the gobs of Elmer's Glue...the glitter...pipe cleaners...rotelli and elbow macaroni spray-painted an attractive shade of gold...magazine cut-outs...pine cone "tiles"...and even more copious amounts of glitter?!? As budding and entirely prolific collage artists, we would all bring home the equivalent of truckloads of um, "impressionistic" works that our smiling-on-the-outside yet gasping-on-the-inside parents would good-naturedly wallpaper the refrigerator with (before permanently retiring them to a dark corner in the basement).

It's nice to know that some of us have managed to propell our love for uniquely-sourced and strategically executed art into a full-time profession, one that actually pays the bills and garners praise from newspapers and online green news sources such as  Green Upgrader and Environmental Graffitti, to name but a few.

Tom Deininger, a Rhode Island-based career-artist has done just that with his dynamic brand of found object creations. Before you make the mistake of dismissing his collection as just another example of landfill-destined junk glued onto canvas, please take a closer look.

True...anyone can glue bits and pieces onto a flat surface, but it requires a true artist to harvest just the right hunks of junk, position them just so and ultimately create what ends up being a living, breathing expression of our consumer culture, one that can actually be considered beautiful despite its rather ugly reality.

His colorful and textural creations are inspiring because they demonstrate that seeing outside of the box can create new opportunities for growth and the salvation of our environment. This is a self-portrait of the artist below...

I don't know about you, but his cheerful presence makes me want to pick through the nearest dumpster and emulate his eco-art technique right this second. Anybody that happy must be onto something...