With lyrical inspiration, El Dorado County artist brings music and scenery alive

Stephanie Almendariz, mother of five, did the jobs she thought she was supposed to do. She worked in a school, been a real estate agent and worked in a bank. In 2008, her husband handed her a pile of CD liners after putting his collection in a storage book. He asked if she could use them to make something; a whole new career as an artist was born.

It started with those CD liner notes, some glue sticks and scissors. The next thing she knew, Almendariz created a 16-by-20-inch portrait of Bob Marley. The background was made up of many Marley faces she cut out from the liner notes. The central image of Marley’s face was built by strips of liner notes with his song lyrics. Truth be told, she was a little disappointed in how it turned out — that is, until she backed up to look at the whole picture. Then she was in love. She hung her creation up at home, and it got a lot of attention from visitors. There were a lot of comments that she should make more and sell them. People started making requests.

Collage wasn’t a new medium for Almendariz.

“Even when I was 5 years old, my favorite thing was to cut and paste,” she said.

She grew up in a family that encouraged all kinds of creative endeavors. Almendariz also remembers sitting in church with her grandpa while he drew the backs of people’s heads in front of him. He then hung them up in a hallway at home, and when church friends came over, they might recognize themselves on the wall.

Now she has moved on from the glue sticks to epoxy and from a piece of cardboard to cradled birch board. In addition to her originals, she is also able to sell prints by having the originals photographed at Sacramento Giclee with a 260-megapixel camera, which picks up every tiny detail. For reference, your iPhone 13 camera has a 12-megapixel capability. Almendariz says the prints have so much detail and dimension that when people see them in person they often want to touch them to see if it’s actually layered paper.

“At shows, I try to have an original on hand, covered in plastic so people can feel free to touch it,” she said.

There’s a lot Almendariz loves about working on these pieces. She loves finding papers to use that relate to her subject, and has file cabinets full of National Geographic magazines at her home in the hills of El Dorado County to use when she can. They’re easiest to use because the spine of the magazine has the year and the subjects covered in each issue. When she can’t find what she needs, she designs her own paper with things like movie quotes on it to incorporate into the piece.

Almendariz also experiments with new techniques.

“I love finding new ways to break the mold and do something new,” she says. In a piece about the Caldor fire, that meant adding Morse code instead of the usual text, and even burning tissue paper to add in layers to give it the smoky, foggy feel of what she had seen while trying to drive and barely making out the car in front of her.

A landscape of the Santa Cruz boardwalk came from a customer who gave her a half-foot stack of papers from Santa Cruz — menus, magazines, travel guides and even a diploma. A print would be fun for any Santa Cruz fan to hang on their wall. For the original customer, they know that their child’s baby footprints are hidden in the sky as well.

One of Almendariz’s most popular pieces, “Tower Bridge, Sacramento, CA,” was made largely of travel guides, and she sneaked the name of the town her husband grew up in into the water below the bridge. When looking at that piece, see if you can find “Ukiah” written in the water.

Since Almendariz puts so much thought, research, and heart into each piece, she sends them to their new homes with a card of information. She recently made a collage of Judy Garland based on her movie “A Star is Born.” The card will say what the collage is made out of, where the inspiration came from, what processes she used, and that it took her 108 hours of planning, cutting and pasting. “Star Wars: Do or Do Not Do, There is No Try” took 117 hours and was made partially from an old copy of the book, “Empire Strikes Back.”

She was inspired for one of her most recent pieces, “Endless Summer,” by her own love for surfing as she grew up. The idea came to her while watching the movie, and she based it on the movie poster for the documentary “The Endless Summer,” from 1966.

Since she didn’t have paper specifically related to it, she wanted to create her own. The documentary only lists a few of the surfers involved, but many were named in the movie. Almendariz went back and watched the movie again, this time taking notes. She wrote down every surfer named, every location and some of the slang used by 1966 surfers. In the finished piece, the sandy beach is covered in map pieces of the locations in the documentary. The sky includes every surfer’s name. The setting sun is composed of surfer slang. She assumed she would have that original for a show in August. It already sold at Midtown Farmers’ Market on March 6.

After growing up in an enclave of eastern Europeans in Sacramento, her next piece is close to her heart.

“I learned so much from the people around me in my neighborhood,” says Almendariz, “I saw what was happening in Ukraine and wondered what I could do.”

She has worked on a Ukranian flag, which she hopes to use to raise money for efforts in the Ukraine.

Almendariz tells her daughter, “You just have to be grateful for what happens.” Sometimes her art sells right away, sometimes it doesn’t. She went from making some for gifts and a commission or two, to selling in a coffee shop. Now she does art shows and the Midtown Farmers’ Market, in addition to selling online. She currently has a waiting list of around 60 people for a commissioned piece — that’s two to three years in cut-and-paste time.

“You have to go back where your heart lies,” Almendariz says of moving from hobby to business. “I feel rejuvenated, and I’m amazed by what has happened so far.”

Learn more

To see more of her work and browse what she has for sale, go to thereclaimistart.com. You can also find her nearly every week at Midtown Farmers’ Market, and follow her on Instagram, @thereclaimistart.