The Potomac Falls home belonging to this unusual artist is decorated with various types of chewing gum. He always buys his gum in bulk, because Jamie Marraccini has been making his artistic creations from used gum for more than 20 years. He has created over 30 works of art in the far corner of his basement including pictures of people with oversized hands and lips and sculptures of eyeballs and tongues.
His works include pictures of multi-colored heads with long eyelashes, outer space and a Rastafarian smiley face. His workspace is crowded with boxes filled with fresh gum, pieces of plywood, ping pong balls and wire and large plastic bins filled with gum chewed by friends, relatives and coworkers. As soon as he gets an idea for a project, he hands out gum to coworkers, gathering up the chewed gum later. He selects brands by looking through a caddy filled with different types collected over the years.
Then, he twirls pieces of gum between his fingers and spreads them across a wooden board, or a ball, or curly wires. Jamie looks for several things when choosing just the right piece, color, how long this lasts and its spread-ability. Chewing gum never gets thrown away. Rana Marraccini, his ever patient wife, no longer uses the basement for anything else, but she doesn’t mind because the end result, she feels, is well worth it.
His most impressive creation is called ‘It Takes a Steady Hand’, an operating-room scene that features two doctors and a frantic patient, which took a staggering 3,905 pieces of gum and one whole year to bring to completion. In that same year, he completed a 2-foot-tall sculpture of eyeballs, hands and feet with 3,177 pieces of gum. Rana, the wife’s favorite part of the process is going to candy expos with Jamie, and helping him to sample the latest flavors of bubble gum.
This amazing artist has been interviewed by talk show and radio hosts from around the world, including Taiwan, Germany and Colombia. He now wants to take it to the next level, and recently created a kit for children to make their own gum art. Chew By Numbers is a step-by-step guide to creating small pictures of tulips and bowls of gumballs out of gums, available on his Web site www.chewbynumbers.com. One day, he wants his own brand of bubble gum, the ‘Gum Art’ brand.
When asked to comment about his incredible art Jamie replied.
“I stumbled upon making art out of gum. I love it, and always liked to save things, So I started sticking gum on different places and creating pictures. I don’t know where my ideas come from, but I have ideas brewing in my head right now. I do it out of the humor of making art out of gum. I do it for the reaction from the kids, and the artistic side as well. Bubblicious Kickin’ Cola, they don’t make that anymore,” he said as he rifled through the box filled with brightly colored wrappers.
When Jamie finds an easy gum to work with, or a great color, he will order boxes and boxes and boxes of it online. His “magic box” is filled with discontinued flavors of chewed gum, including Carefree Alpine Mint, which gets used for anything white. He saves his gum in Tupperware bowls leaving the tops off and storing them in a sealed plastic bin. The basement is also filled with boxes of gum, including 50 pounds of discontinued flavors.
Whichever way you look at it, thinking either that using chewed gum is very environmentally friendly or just plain gross, you cannot deny that this highly talented artist has a great deal to offer. His works are thought provoking and frankly brilliantly executed, which is why they have been so well received throughout the global artistic communities. We will undoubtedly see much more of this weird and wonderful type of art in years to come, and Jamie Marraccini will be leading the pack.
