To Coin a Phrase

In recent years, for the sake of visual interest, word play and a touch of reality, I have begun to add heavily textured elements to my paintings. I love to find beads, fabrics and printed matter, which will add instant recognition of Time and Place to the work.

There are two problems with this approach. One is that I often have a very limited supply of whatever it is that I am using at the time. And so if my thoughts continue down a certain road, I cannot continue to use the very same beads, or other found objects for very long. This is interruptive to my train of thought.

The other problem is that many of the elements in which I am interested are quite heavy. I am using strong paper and strong glues, but I am still very limited to objects which will not weigh down my paper unduly, or to objects which do not have too much three dimensional qualities, or else scanning and framing will eventually become problematic.

While in Beaufort viewing the Blackbeard exhibit, I happened upon some reproduction coins of the American colonial period. I was interested in the possibility of using the coins as collage elements in future paintings, but given the fact that I would like to really be able to pile on the coins and in light of the price of the coins, it didn’t seem immediately practical. I bought a selection anyway as a thought was forming in my mind…

I frequently use gel medium to adhere various pieces of old jewelry and so on to my paintings and I knew it could be manipulated into high impasto areas. I wondered if it could also be cast. If it could, then I could add as many coins as I wanted to my paintings and still have lightness and flexibility as well at the end.

Upon returning home I looked up the idea but found nothing on the web to assure me that gel medium could be cast. But I did find a product called Amazing Mold Putty .

It consists of two types of soft, pliable mold element which must be mixed together thoroughly, somewhat like epoxy, except that it is safe to the touch. It can also be purchased in bulk.

Once the putty was thoroughly mixed, I rolled it flat and pressed my coins into it. I left them there for the prescribed amount of time – about 25 minutes.

The mold easily released the coins and there was no residue left on them upon removal.

See what a beautifully detailed impression it makes?

The next day I experimented with just three of the coin impressions by filling them with my heavy bodied gel medium and allowing them to dry overnight.

When I very easily removed the dried gel medium from the mold putty, I had a beautiful impression in the gel.

The gel “coin” is light and flexible.


I painted each coin with a dark black-brown mix of acrylic paint and allowed that to dry. Then I coated them lightly with gold and silver respectively, just allowing the brush to glide over the surface in such a way as to catch the details and highlight them.

Here are pictures of the coins I made next to the original reproduction coins.


Now the coins can be trimmed or not, and glued down onto paper or canvas as collage elements while hardly adding any weight at all. They will remain as flexible as the acrylic paint around them, because they actually are only a layer of paint.

Such realistic touches will add authenticity to my paintings at the same time as a visual dimension. While I am perfectly capable of painting almost any illusion, in certain kinds of artworks such real items can be far more interesting and telling. The coins you see me produce here are the ones I used in the previous painting of the Mistress and the Stray Bay Horse.

Now I am in the middle of attempting the entire “pile” of coins.

Perhaps they will serve to hearken the mind to sunken treasures partly covered with sand and other bits of flotsam and jetsam. Now… exactly what other flotsam and jetsam? Hmmmm….

Historical note: The Spanish dollar (piece of eight) was legal tender in the early American colonies and in the US until 1857. It was by far the most common coin of Colonial times. The textured edge of the coin existed in order to prevent unscrupulous persons from scraping off the silver undetected.