Mixed-media artists incorporate a variety of items in their pieces, though most focus on paint, textiles and occasionally other natural materials. But Port Orchard resident Dawnell Vaughn-Bundrant not only uses paint and trinkets such as earrings, tiny gears and photographs, but has found a way to use recycled oxygen tubes in her art pieces. She now calls her art business O2B Art.
For years, she struggled with hereditary pulmonary fibrosis. Her mother died from complications of the disease in 2012. Vaughn-Bundrant lost her grandmother Violet and her uncle Eddie to it as well, and nearly died herself. Despite the losses in her life, she has never given up. Her illness progressed to a critical point in 2018, when she was put on oxygen full time. She was no longer able to walk on her own and needed a wheelchair — two things that she said were very difficult for her to face.
Knowing that her likelihood of survival was dwindling, with oxygen tanks in tow, Vaughn-Bundrant set out on a trip of a lifetime in 2018, thanks to a family friend. With the help of a friend and her sister, she was able to tour Paris, London, Rome and Pompei. By the following year, she was going downhill quickly, she said.
The disease wrecked her body, resulting in clubbed fingernails and other challenging symptoms. Through it all, she was still painting and creating when she felt up to it. One day, Vaughn-Bundrant looked at the pile of oxygen tubing and tried to think of a way to keep it out of the trash bin. Recycling and reusing are important to her, so she thought about it for a while and became inspired to use it in an art piece. The first mixed-media piece she made that incorporated the tubing was a white canvas painting that featured the Eiffel Tower, dated 2018.
Vaughn-Bundrant has explored a variety of media since her first art classes in grade school. She has been a talented artist since those early years and still has pieces of a poster that she drew and colored in third grade, cutting apart and decoupaging onto a canvas. Her teacher had the original poster hanging in the classroom, she said.
She graduated from South Kitsap High School, where she took all the art classes available to her and became the art teacher’s assistant. By the time she was graduating from high school, Vaughn-Bundrant had a job as a cosmetologist. Her South Kitsap High School art teacher, Pete Summerall, helped her with a portfolio that won her an art school scholarship, she said, but at the time, the art school schedule would have interfered with her work at the hair salon. She used her art scholarship later and was accepted into the Northwest College of Art. She made the decision not to go on to art school, but she didn’t stop creating art.
“I did acrylics, and for a long time I used all pencils and didn’t paint much,” Vaughn-Bundrant said. “I did some ink work, and I’ve done a little bit of everything. But when the oxygen tubing came in, I started doing the mixed media, and it escalated.”
Those canvases feature a base of acrylic paint and are layered with photographs as well as tiny pieces of inspiration that she finds in some unlikely places, such as her late mother’s jewelry collection. Her works tell a meaningful story. Most of those pieces are in her personal collection, the ones that have sentimental meaning for her, and she doesn’t plan to sell those. However, Vaughn-Bundrant works on commissioned pieces as well, using the same technique, customizing each one to reflect the memories, life experiences and meaningful moments for the client.
Before she received her double lung transplant in 2019, she completed two pieces of art that featured the oxygen tubing. Prior to her surgery, Vaughn- Bundrant’s health deteriorated to the point of hospitalization, and she only had a couple of weeks to live, she said. She could no longer manage her illness at home, even with the oxygen. She said she was admitted to the University of Washington Hospital in Seattle and was subsequently transferred to a facility in Burien that specializes in oxygen care management. Two days after being transferred there, she got the news that a transplant was available for her.
Vaughn-Bundrant considers her recovery a miracle. When she went in for surgery in 2019, doctors found that she had cancer in both lungs, but it had not spread to other organs.
“Getting the transplant is just part of it,” she said. “That saves your life, but you have a long way to come back to where you were. I had about two weeks to live when they opened me up, and they said that the fibrosis encapsulated the tumors, so what was killing me was also saving me from the cancer.”
Her surgery gave her life back, she said. Her husband, Scott, said she’s a living miracle.
“I didn’t wake up for two days, and it is literally like being born again,” she said.
While she was on the road to recovery, the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, making her new lease on life a little more subdued, and the fear for her life again very real. She said her husband bought her a respirator, and Vaughn-Bundrant was locked down. Because she has to take anti-rejection medications, a total of 14 medications each day, she has a weakened immune system.
“They dumb down your immune system, because if those cells wake up fully, they will start to attack the new organ,” Vaughn-Bundrant said. “I have to be careful, and I can’t be around sick people. I have nieces and nephews and it’s hard not to be around little kids, but I don’t want to go back to where I was.”
As soon as she was able, Vaughn- Bundrant was back in her art studio, coming up with new ideas and putting her vision of them onto canvas.
Facing the reality of death, fighting to come back from the brink and making it through the pandemic while being immune-compromised has changed her, she said, and it also changed her art.
“All I can think to describe it is that I get more intense with it,” she said. “It’s like I want to taste it, if that makes sense. Like making a good pasta, whenever it gets to the point of being perfect.”
The inspiration kept on coming, and Vaughn-Bundrant completed a piece dedicated to Rome and another to the music of Seattle bands of the ’90s, complete with a black hole sun in the corner, a nod to the Chris Cornell song of the same name.
Her Puget Sound piece started with one of her mother’s earrings that reminded her of a buoy, which she used as such for the ferry and incorporated into the artwork, along with all sorts of references to Puget Sound, including a vanity plate with the name of her business.
“It was a lot for me to let it go, but I did sell it,” she said.
She takes commission orders and is working on several pieces for clients. One that she just completed for a friend has a George Harrison theme.
“I have to be inspired,” she said. “It takes me a while to complete one.”
Most of her pieces are sentimental to her, making them meaningful and also very difficult to part with.
On her living room wall, Vaughn- Bundrant has several of her paintings, including a headshot of an African American woman. It’s a mixed-media piece. She used some of her late mother’s hoop earrings to create a texture for the hair that almost brings it to life.
Living through what she has, Vaughn-Bundrant said that she doesn’t waste time on people who don’t inspire or support her. She sticks with the people who love her, enjoy her work and cheer her on.
She notes, “I am so grateful for my donor — without them I wouldn’t be here and none of this would be possible.”
“When you’re sick, it’s not the things that you did that you regret, it’s the things you didn’t,” Vaughn- Bundrant said. “The things you feared seem trivial, and there’s nothing more scary than having your life on the line. You think of all of these things that you could have had time for, and you didn’t. Seize the day. Stand where you shine the brightest.”
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