The Oka Process

As I've been working on these little Oka box plaster'n'wax thingies (Technical Term!) I thought it might be fun to show a before during and after and discuss the process.

One of the ..erm.. issues of being an assemblage artist is coming across seemingly innocuous items and thinking, "I could do something with this!" Just ask my burgeoning studio shelves. The struggle is real people. Very, very real!

I love cheese. I love eating it and finding it and since last year, making it. And while I don't love the fact that one of my fave cheeses, Oka, has since sold out been bought out by Agropur, I still buy it. Because CHEESE! It comes packaged in these perfectly proportioned boxes, 4 x4 x 2", made of hearty cardstock. So. Cute. But when they start accumulating faster than rabbits (because. cheese!) I decided to do something with them.

Initially, I just stashed the boxes themselves (like I said, cute! and perfectly proportioned!) During my Waxenplast class one of the lessons was to wrap plaster cloth around cardboard. I grabbed one of the boxes and wrapped it. It ended up very similar to commercial 4x4" gallery wrapped canvas. I noticed however that the sides are made of thinner cardboard leading to the plastercloth kinda warping them and they came away cleanly from the 4x4" top/bottoms. So I ripped'em apart and used one of those (above) as a demo.

The Calendar Portrait Project was born... heretofore known as The Oka Portrait Project: