Mx.D.P

There were three gateways…

Gateway one: the poem STUFF. Written at the beginning of the year, I wanted to use the poem for something else the reuse, reduce, recycle element of my practice…

STUFF

Do you know what is happening?

I think maybe you do.

I believe we all know.

But sometimes,

It’s best not to look.

They talk about.

Loss of assets.

Countries are assets.

Large areas of the Earth are to be evacuated.

We are assets,

Other, less suicidal species are assets.

The museums are full.

The galleries are full.

The underground art storage facilities are full.

They are CLIMATE-controlled assets.

Should we continue?

Using resources to make more Art?

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and Refuse

Let’s be careful how we wash our brushes.

Let’s make use of the materials already made.

Let’s use up the unused Vintage paint.

Let’s paint over that Caravaggio!

But when there are no more ways to Greenwash the truth.

The face of extinction turns to us and asks,

What should art be?

Art always changes, always evolves.

Still, we can paint.

Just without using paint.

Without making more STUFF.

Gateway two: was my daughter’s visit this weekend. She suggested that we follow the ethos of that poem and paint over an existing work, recycling and reusing it.

She had seen people on TikTok creating Halloween art on old paintings, which sparked the idea.

Gateway Three:

Finally – take a risk!

Do something in your art practice this week that might not work…

Alice purchased four paintings from a charity shop, and I chose a traditional seascape to work on. Living on the beach by the sea, I wanted to address climate change within this recycled piece. I envisioned the Climate Change Kraken coming to take the sailing ship from the 19th-century colonial oil painting, Sailing Vessels off Tynemouth John Wilson Carmichael (British, 1800-1886) apparently he painted several views of this and I found a few online in sales.

To our amusement, when we disassembled the painting, we discovered that instead of an art print, it was a page from a 1985 calendar that had been carefully framed. It had already been recycled into wall art, then donated to a charity shop, and now it was being transformed once again, which had a poetic quality to it.

I wanted to depict the ship being destroyed, so I used paint and gel plate printing to bring the Kraken to life. The coated textured paper didn’t take the print well, but it created an interesting surface that allowed me to easily remove the acrylic paint with an alcohol wipe.

I painted the faded grey mount with black acrylic paint and wrote excerpts and rewrites of the poem around the mouth of the mount using a white gel pen. I’ve been looking at David Shrigley’s work and wanted to put my writing into my visual work. It was a spur-of-the-moment idea, not planned and I didn’t carefully transpose the poem, rather the opposite I changed it…

The frame was sprayed with the left over 50% Voc spray as used for the back drop of STUFF

Nothing goes to waste and layers of saved waste paint were glued onto the frame, creating a texture reminiscent of Kraken skin. I peeled this paint off a cradle board painting and kept it in my acrylic paint box, it screamed out to be used in this project and felt good to use.

All the paints I used were vintage and secondhand, the gold paint I made from recycled mica, icing gum trag and distiled water, similar to the paint used by Turner for his early water colours (he didn’t use sparkle mica but did use anything he could get hold of including waste materials from early industrial sites.

Surprisingly, what I initially thought would be a simple, fun, experimental activity turned out to be something worth exploring further. I have two more reclaimed charity shop pictures, and I’m fascinated to see what I create with them.