Trash Talk

It looked like a butterscotch-candy wrapper. “A lady’s dress!” exclaims artist Anita Theresa Lafond. “See? People only untwist one end to get the candy out. And when they throw it on the ground, the wrapper looks like a dress.”

Lafond makes greeting cards that elevate the flotsam of our lives into art. “I don’t have a car,” she explains, “so I walk.” During her daily treks through Hollywood, Lafond fills her pockets with the paint and canvas of her work: gum wrappers, safety pins, old matchbooks. “The day after Halloween is a godsend,” she says. “And bus stops after rush hour.” So are the leftovers of fender benders. “Once I found part of a taillight shaped like a grand piano.”

Under Lafond’s remarkable eye, used matches become horses. An abandoned coffee stirrer finds work as a gondolier’s paddle. Gum wrappers take on new life as evening gowns. Her scenes are funny, compassionate and often wistful: three wise men, two holding onto a camel, the other with a teddy bear. A father and child asleep together in an easy chair.

She has sold her cards through Dutton’s Brentwood Bookstore, MOCA’s gift shop and Uncle Jer’s (“I walk my cards over to Uncle Jer’s,” she says. “It’ s an hour’s walk and I usually find good stuff.”)

And if someone asks her how she does it, Lafond simply dips into her pocket. “I’ll ask them, ‘What do you see here? A gum wrapper.’ I shape it a little and then say, ‘Now look again.’ ”