40 days of art

08

Painting on Weird Stuff

By this point, I had made a lot of collages, but because color printing is expensive, I was limited to printing things 13 x 19. I wanted to make art that was large, so I decided to do hand-cut collages versus digital collages. Buying brand new canvases to attach a collage to seemed wasteful especially since there were so many other perfectly paintable surfaces available. I would scour thrift shops and roadsides to find random flat-ish surfaces like cabinet doors, fan blades, frying pans and broken laptops. I would paint on anything! I’ve always been into squeezing a last use out of something that may be otherwise discarded.

I would go to Kinkos and print out large black and white copies, cut them out, and then paint the background of my surface and fill in the black and white photo with paint, as you would with a coloring  book. The effect was pretty cool and I was able to make larger art pieces affordably.

Looking back on this I really like the ideas, but the execution makes me feel a little embarrassed. But I guess it’s all about growth and not being too hard on myself. I may revisit these concepts later now that I have learned a lot more about construction.