I’ve made some carved adjustments to the Wake Up print but haven’t yet printed the results. What I have been doing is dismantling and cutting up old paintings that I’ve felt are not my best. I’m working, slowly, to whittle down my stuff–whether works I’ve made or things I’ve bought. As part of that I’ve decided to be bold and take apart some canvases. This has felt daring at times because I feel that I’m breaking a taboo. I now have a pile of large and small pieces of old paintings. What I’ll do with them is still percolating within me.
One important thing I learned the other day was: Do not cut up your work until you’ve photographed it whole, that is, unless you don’t want a record of it. I reassembled the jigsaw puzzle of the most recent canvas I’d cut up after realizing I had never taken photos of it. This, despite having taken multiple photos of most of the other work I’ve done.
One of the most detailed processes was dismantling an old self portrait on a canvas board–peeling the canvas off, sponging the back to remove bits of the paper board still stuck to it and then recycling the board. Once I’d done that and cut the image into pieces, I played around with the strips and wove some of them together.
I’ll let you know where all this playing around leads as I find that out myself.
Arts of May 