Need a dryer-lint sculpture of Donald Trump? This Cleveland artist has you covered.
CLEVELAND — Sandy Buffie started doing dryer-lint sculptures 20 years ago, when she was idly playing with some wet lint in her hand while talking to her mother on the phone.
“I have to go,” Buffie said to her mom, recalling the moment during a Thursday interview with Yahoo News. “I made a man out of dryer lint, and she told me I needed to go back to work.”
She kept with it, making her first full sculpture of Albert Einstein — still one of her favorites, residing in a private home — and now owns and operates Sandy Buffie Designs, which is located just a few blocks from the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland. With the Republican National Convention coming to town and a chance to apply her talents to a good cause, she turned her attention to Donald Trump.
“I couldn’t resist the hair,” said Buffie, who started her work on it in April. “My husband is my hardest critic and he thought I nailed this one.”
She’s auctioning off the sculpture to benefit the Center for Arts-Inspired Learning, a nonprofit organization in Cleveland that hires local artists to go into schools and work with students. She plans to end the bidding Friday, but if there’s interest, she would extend it. One visitor earlier this week said that she was a friend of Trump’s and would relay news of the art creation’s existence to the Republican nominee, but so far Buffie hasn’t heard anything. She said that she is not supporting Trump, but that her piece was apolitical and meant to raise money for charity.
Trump is the first politician she’s created, because she usually does athletes, or people with wild hair or facial features. The sculpture bases are created with whatever happens to be in her recycle bin, with the Trump sculpture core consisting of a plastic milk jug, chicken wire and painter’s tape. Some of the pieces require a bit more finessing, such as her Jay Leno, whose chin was so heavy that she had to balance it out by packing sand in the back of the head.
“I mix the dryer lint with glue, and I put a layer on,” Buffie said, describing a process that generally takes three months. “Then I have to wait until it dries, then another layer. The actual sculpting time is not nearly three months.”
As far as acquiring the most important materials for her work? That’s a group effort, including a little help from a local business.
“All I do is send it out on my Facebook, or my Instagram, or my Twitter that I need lint, and it shows up at the door, piles of it,” said Buffie. “The hotel over here, now the Residence Inn, brings it over if I need it, and it’s 100 percent cotton and it’s white from their towels. So that’s, like, primo. That’s the good stuff.”
Buffie said the reasons she’s stuck with this peculiar medium for two decades are that it’s fun, it hardens really well, it’s permanent and you don’t need a kiln.
The more attractive the person, the more difficult it is to craft, according to Buffie. The lint is naturally coarse and you can’t smooth it like clay, so capturing the essence of George Clooney — whose model is currently shelved in the back of her workshop because she can’t get the chin the way she likes it — is tougher than creating movie monsters. That fact, combined with her love of Halloween, is one reason her gallery contains a Frankenstein monster, a Wolfman and a Dracula that some customers this week have mistaken for Ted Cruz.
Perhaps the most random part of her collection is a sculpture of Shaquille O’Neal’s late dog Thor. Buffie’s brother groomed Thor in Los Angeles and sent some of his fur, which went into the sculpture’s creation. Buffie said her dream is for O’Neal, who played for the Cavaliers late in his career, to make a return trip to Cleveland and pick up the piece based on his late Rottweiler.
Buffie’s home is near her shop, just off Public Square, an area that has been heavily policed in anticipation of potentially violent protests. She said that most of her bump in business has come from Clevelanders who are exploring the big political show in town. Despite concerns about security, it’s been so far, so good, in Buffie’s opinion.
“The city’s showing really well, everybody feels really safe, they did an amazing job with security. Absolutely amazing.”
