CLAY COUNTY – Curt Towne never wants to see an old album or guitar thrown into a landfill. So he worked with other local musicians to transform them into different art forms.

“I just I can’t stand that, I just can’t,” Towne said. “If you can repurpose something, and somebody can enjoy it and it becomes an art again in some other form, that’s really what it’s all about. It was intended with love.”

Towne and his Guitar Station business partner Jim Correia, have provided more than 100 vinyl albums to organizations like the Art Guild of Orange Park. They were turned from scratched and worthless music pieces into colorful art pieces. The musicians also have turned over old guitars.

“It was all Curt’s idea,” Correia said. “In all, we’ve probably turned over more than 100 pieces of vinyl. It’s great to see them be repurposed to something that’s beautiful.”

Towne said artists also get their unique canvases from Freddie Oca from Anarchy Records in Jacksonville.

“You take somebody’s passion and recreate a new passion,” Towne said. “There’s nothing better than that.”

“Anarchy Vinyl donates a lot of records that are scratched and not sellable,” Towne said. “We donate a lot of vinyls that might not ever do anything other than fill a landfill.”

Many of the pieces created by a children’s art group and the Art Guild of Orange Park are on display in The Gallery at Wehner’s on College Drive.

“They had some artists volunteer to do some of those records, and they put their work in one of my shows,” said Wehner curator Cynthia Csalovszki. “My goal is to be community-based. I said I’d be happy to show them (at Wehner’s).”

The display, which includes special Christmas albums, will run through September, Csalovszki said.

The artwork is also featured in the main lobby of the Clay County Courthouse, the Guitar Station in Green Cove Springs and at the Floating Sea Aquatics on Old Kings Road in Jacksonville.

One of the Orange Park artists created the guitar that was raffled to benefit Dani-Lynn Early, a girl born with half a heart and suffers from HLHS, VSD and PAPVR.

“It’s a group of musicians and artists who want to make a difference in the world because kids need art, music, dance and theatre,” she said.

She also painted a guitar that was auctioned at the recent St. Michael’s Soldier’s Tailgate for the Troops.

“(Curt) and Paul and all the other musicians that have been donating guitars cannot bear to throw these guitars in the landfill,” she said. “So they are just so jazzed all of us artists want to decorate them and then auction them off for all these different causes. We’re thrilled to do it because it’s so fun to have such a weird surface to decorate.”