Ruby Silvious’ paintings prove that there is no canvas too small. With almost 20k followers on Instagram, she’s internationally recognized for her miniature paintings and collages on used tea bags.
It all started in 2015, when Silvious launched her 363 Days of Tea project – a visual daily record of her impression of the moment, using the emptied-out tea bag as her canvas, and altering it to create a new work of art every day for 363 days.
“I opened an Instagram account and said, ‘Let’s just see,’” she shared with Hudson Valley One. “I knew I wanted to do a tea-themed project, but just couldn’t decide how to do it. On the third day of the year, I was sitting in a coffeeshop in New York City, so I posted a picture of my cup of tea and whatever I was eating. That was ‘Day One,’ and it took off from there: I got ten ‘likes’ the first day and I was ecstatic. ‘Wow! I was really not expecting an audience.’”
Ever since, Silvious has been drawing, painting, printing, and collaging moody, evocative and sometimes whimsical art on the used teabag paper. Each bag is emptied of its contents and dried on a paper towel. Some bags are opened and laid flat, while others are emptied without changing the original shape of the bag.
“My goal when I first started this project was to see if I had the discipline to actually paint something every day,” she said, “but it’s challenging.” Check out some of her work in the gallery below.
