Country folks call it “road kill.”
But Great Falls artist Colleen Karmol finds beauty in the process of natural selection by which older, weaker, and less clever members of the wildlife population are eliminated by their most pervasive predator: the automobile.
Karmol relies on her sense of color and texture and her background in horticulture and interior design to merge into art such disparate “found” ingredients as Van Latham silk chenille tassels and the tails, antlers and carapaces of fresh road kill.
With her friends acting as finders, she collects raccoon tails, deer antlers, and turtle shells from double yellow lines in Great Falls to be tanned and preserved, then combined with flowers, ribbons, fabric and tassels to form wreaths, swags, centerpieces and cornices that decorate some of the most elegant homes in Great Falls.
“I know it’s dead, but it’s alive. It’s recycling what nature gave us.” said Karmol. The deer antlers she harvests have been shed, or they come from animals that are too weak to survive.
“There are too many of them, and they are starving. Healthy animals don’t get hit,” Karmol said. “It’s either a celebration of the life we have here, or a salute to the automobile.”
She also uses vegetables such as pomegranates, artichokes, and sliced lemons. After drying on rattan for several months, Karmol said, a lemon turns black while its rind stays yellow. She adds gold-flecked paint “for a little shine.”
Most of the wreaths contain natural elements. Their prices range from $65 to $500.
“People like them enough to pay big bucks for them,” says Karmol’s friend and patron, Marcia Fouquet, president of the Great Falls Art Center.
Double Yellow Line
It was Fouquet who harvested a raccoon tail from the double yellow line on Walker Road. “I drove it to my country boys on Jeffrey Drive, Robert and Sam Jenkins, and I said, 'Will you please saw the tail off nice and neat?'” she said.
“So they ‘sawed it off nice and neat.’ I taped the end up with duck tape, and wrapped it up real pretty. And that was Colleen’s Christmas present,” Fouquet said.
Karmol, a woman who says she doesn’t need roses for Valentine’s Day because she buys them once a week to be dried for her artwork, tanned it with 20 Mule Team Borax.
“It’s the poor man’s way of tanning” that eliminates the gamy smell and “any little critters” while preserving the woof and weave of the animal’s fluffy winter coat, she explained.
“Colleen was already into fox tails. That got her into raccoon tails,” Fouquet said. “I also gave her the pheasant feathers.”
Karmol combined them with the raccoon tail, the tail from a white-tailed deer, a turtle shell, and other locally harvested components to create a $300 centerpiece for the bar at The Tavern that was commissioned by its owner, Bob Slade of McLean.
“He really likes a ‘Ralph Lauren meets Boys’ Life’ style of art,” Karmol said. “No gilding, and no fru-fru. He had the idea of a bush with a raccoon tail coming out of it.”
“Holy Moly. That’s pretty wild-looking, isn’t it?” said Slade when Karmol delivered the piece to The Tavern, just before the Super Bowl kickoff on Feb. 3.
A few patrons were watching a basketball game that flickered on the television sets above the bar when Karmol arrived with her creation. She quietly requested a ladder.
The manager found one and held it steady as the piece of art was centered among the wine bottles above the bar.
Eclectic and Eccentric
From that position, the raccoon tail hung as naturally as if it had just shinnied up a tree. A deer’s white tail drifted down next to it and a turtle shell nestled nearby, ensconced in naturally-dried vegetation.
A small yellow finch, typical of Karmol’s quixotic out-of-context style, perched on a rack of deer antlers below.
Feminine, masculine, and natural as a Great Falls forest, the piece softened the effect of a mounted deer head and stuffed fox that already adorned the walls of Great Falls’ latest watering hole.
Women who don’t go for taxidermy love Karmol’s art.
They bid on her pieces at two exhibits last year, and commissioned more work after her sidewalk display at Great Falls Shopping Center last December. They’re also sold at The Design Center.
Karmol describes her work as “eclectic and eccentric.”
“No two are alike,” said Fouquet, who teaches art classes at the Art Center. “They are functional. They enhance the area around them, and they are unique. You never know what ingredients she will use.”
Nothing Goes to Waste
In a spare bedroom in her house on River Bend Road, Karmol keeps clear plastic containers of varied elements that will find their way into her designs.
When she is ready to work, she evaluates their colors and textures, a habit she formed in childhood, and emerges with a spontaneous artistic theme.
“My mother always let me have my way with color and form and function,” she said. “I love color.”
Although she has no formal training in art, Karmol has made wreaths for years.
Last year, her friends Joyce Sutcliffe and Fouquet encouraged her to grow the avocation into a business.
“We worked on the flyer for her to have the first showing at her house, and from there, it’s just blossomed,” said Sutcliffe.
Karmol has studied horticulture and worked designing window treatments for an interior designer. She’s been an active volunteer for many local Republican Party candidates and is a former district party chairman. She was president of the Great Falls Republican Women.
Now, she recycles the wooden stakes from political yard signs into frames for window cornices uses the back sides of political posters to absorb excess spray paint.
They Like It
Since the first public showing of her work last September, Karmol has held one more. and she plans a third in March. On Feb. 22-24, her work will be displayed at the Designer Showhouse at the Capital Expo Center in Chantilly.
Still, she said, she tenses up before she delivers a piece, anxious whether people will like it. But “once they see it, they really do like my stuff,” she said.
“That’s why I’ve sold 98 percent of everything I’ve done. There’s a definite need for what I do.”