From bottle caps to gemstones — vivid color shines

And to think it all began with that poster child for environmental waste: the disposable diaper.

Not that the San Antonio artist has found a way to use Huggies in her work (though it's not out of the question). Over the years, however, she has made treasure from trash such as coffee filters, cigarette wrappers, brown paper grocery bags, pull tabs, foil wrappers, teabags and, of course, aluminum cans.

"I've worked with recycled materials for as long as I can remember," Valencia said the other day at the small Cactus Bra Space in the Blue Star Arts Complex, where an exhibition of her latest work just opened for Contemporary Art Month. "And it goes back to when I was raising my kids and changing all those disposable diapers. Besides, I'm a cheapskate."

About three years ago, Valencia began working with bottle caps.

For her bottle-cap paintings such as Trilogy and Fat Tuesday, she builds a background of color on canvases of various sizes, then, using a strong jeweler's glue ("I have to work outside on my porch because of the fumes"), she bonds bottle caps with the inside facing out onto the surfaces, in layers and, at times, patterns.

"I don't know," she says, "there must be thousands of them."

Valencia paints each cap in brilliant blue and gold and turquoise and magenta, creating scintillating works that sparkle and shine like, well, gemstones.

"I want them to look like gemstones," she says. "Generations from now, I'd like for people to discover them and say, 'Oh, this is an interesting artifact.' Like the way colorful gemstones would be uncovered by swashbuckling adventurers in the past."

A sweet, unassuming woman whom you kind of want to adopt as a t¿a or abuela, Valencia is a San Antonio native whose r¿sum¿ belies her accommodating nature.