Ramona Hotel the ARTIST : www.ramonahotel.us

Do not use flickr mail

e-mail: ramonahotel@ccvn.com

Ramona Hotel was born in Dayton, Ohio as Donna Ellen Phillips; mother from Harlan County, Kentucky and father from Langdale, Alabama.

After a tour in the military, in an Appalachian backlash the family settled in California. Little did they know that as the 60’s were about to happen , their only child an artistic pre-teen, would never be the same again. Independent minded with a lifelong cultivation of eccentricity and a longing for her Southern roots, she closed a business she had for 22 years and in 1995 left California for southern Appalachia. She currently resides and makes art deep in the mountains of western North Carolina, up in the hills, out in the sticks, “in a place you can’t get to from here”.

“Basically I had everything I needed and wanted in California; grew up, got a pretty good education, survived sex, drugs, rock’n’roll, San Francisco, and a long run of trying to maintain my creativity in the context of running a business. As an adult I considered the west coast my home by default.

But the best memories of my life were of times I had spent with my grandmother in Loyall, a small community in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky, where the children made toys of cast offs, played house in the wood shed, recycling was not yet a word but making-do a necessity, and the sooty decrepit nature of everything never denied the love that was present.” " I can't think of a happier thing to be doing than making mud pies and mud people on my grannies porch or coloring and drawing with the neiborhood kids."

“In the 1980’s and early 90’s I worked in collage and assemblage using appropriated imagery from magazines and other found materials. My bottle cap interest began about 1987. It was then that I had an epiphany at the drive-in movie lot flea market, where I discovered the ground to be littered with many years of discarded bottle caps in every stage of decomposition. Having an affinity for the beauty of rust, the casually discarded and valueless object, and a make-do attitude, I knew I had come upon something that would be important to me.”

“At first I used the rusty bottle caps in my collage and assemblage work making a transition over several years from a secondary consideration to a primary one and toward the use of more recently discarded caps. In 2000 immobilized with a broken ankle, I began to take the making of my bottle cap characters seriously. As I sat in my work area with my foot propped up and made them all day, every day, I considered the color and logos on the caps as sometimes identifying the characters and humor of the pieces.”

“I love making the characters and I relate to the making as when creating my own paper dolls as a child, giving them whatever face I wanted and dressing them. I want to make the art wearable, to be a conversation piece, to be humorous, perhaps to make a statement. I want them to be able to be enjoyed displayed when not worn, mounted in a shadow box, pinned on a small pillow, or hanging from a ribbon as a decorative item, or clustered together as a shrine to the characters and cult heroes and of our time. Most of all, my hope is that they bring a smile to those who wear and view them.”

SHOWs:

Ramona Hotel had 2 pieces of folk art , bottlecap snakes, at the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Fok Art , August 4 through October 22 of 2006.

Next Shows:

17th Street Art Fair in Atlantic Station, Atlanta, GA

September 27-28, 2008

TRAM..... folk art fair. Traveler's Rest, South Carolina. October 4, 2008

Eco Accessories Trunk Show at Eco Manor, Atlanta, GA

www.Ecomanor.com

October 10, 2008

GOOD FOLK FEST, Louisville, Kentucky

November 21-23, Mellwood Art Center, Mellwood St

You can find Ramona's Bottlecap Characters in galleries and shops across the Southeast:

American Folk Art , Asheville, NC

Simply Irresistible, Tryon, NC

KY Museumof Art and Craft, Louisville, KY

KY Folk Art Center, Morehead, KY

Published by Cantata Press

Day of the Dead Crafts

Ramona Hotel the Woman

Artistic, creative, inventive, problem solving, intelligent, street-wise,world-wise and experienced, spiritual, funny, entertaining, serious, loving, communicative, youthful, traveler, seeker of new experiences, sophisticated hillbilly,

living alone with dogs and cats, sometimes lonely, but mostly happy and content.

Nice article in Carolina Home and Garden Magazine "Obsessions".

www.carolinahg.com/pages/current-issue/summer-08/obsessio...