If empty glass bottles can be made into creative and practical items, American artist Jim Dingilian considers them as a medium to work on his impressive artworks. With glass bottles as his canvas, candle soot as his paint, and Q-tips, skewers and needles as his brushes, the artist is able to create stunning sketch-like like images.
Jim collects empty liquor bottles of various sizes, shapes, and colors that he finds. He sees each discarded bottle as an “artifact of consumption, delight, or dread,” a subject that he conveys in his art pieces. “The miniature scenes I depict are of locations on the edge of suburbia which seem mysterious or even slightly menacing despite their commonplace nature”, Jim Dingilian says.
To be able to create these meticulous scenes, he smokes the interior of the bottles with a candle.
After laying a coat of soot on the lining of the bottles, he painstakingly scrapes and etches away with q-tips, needles, and skewers to paint picture-perfect landscapes.
“The bottles add to the implied narratives of transgression. When found by the sides of roads or in the weeds near the edges of parking lots, empty liquor bottles are artifacts of consumption, delight, or dread,” he says.
“As art objects, they become hourglasses of sorts, their drained interiors now inhabited by dim memories.”
Just thinking how he was able to make such detailed scenery, how he managed to keep an unbelievably steady hand and incredible wrist control, and how he had worked through a narrow bottle, made each of his creations more impressive.
If you want to see more of Jim Dingilian’s handiworks, check out his website here.