Let’s chop up your old artwork

Be brave, try re-working it

If you’re anything like me, you have stacks and stacks of old art experiments stashed away somewhere. In my case, it’s failed watercolours, mediocre ink wash tests,  and endless pages of brushstroke technique practice. During the pandemic, I took several watercolour painting classes, through either Skillshare, or Domestika. As I painted and practiced, the thick watercolour papers started piling up. I thought I’d reuse them one day as “collage-fodder” and/or go through them to pull out my favourites. Now that I’m starting to settle into my new studio (some 3 years later) that day has come!

I started by going through the stacks and pulling out anything that was truly a random hot mess. Anything I liked, but was unsure of, went back in the “keep it for now” pile. Everything else got mercilessly chopped up into pieces roughly 4.5”x6”. My first instinct is to work large, so I often used to cover entire sheets of 9”x12” with my, er, learning style. But over the years, I’ve found that I really enjoy working a smaller size layout. There’s something satisfying about flipping through a consistent size stack of art you’ve made, a bit like your very own creative deck of cards.

Chopping up the larger pieces instantly makes new, random compositions out of old work— they immediately become more interesting.

I  have been quite uninspired lately. It’s not unexpected, as I just took down an exhibition I had been working towards for months, and there’s the inevitable post-show dip. My brand new studio is a mess because I had to hit the ground running in order to hang the show on time. I wanted to be able to just start making art again this winter, but I have found myself flailing and disorganized. I decided I would start each day in the studio by randomly choosing one of these new chopped up cards to create something. No pressure, no rules, no fear of the blank page, just doodle on what was already there to get the juices flowing.

But a curious thing happened when I shuffled through my pile of newly chopped-up cards, I was instantly inspired to start working on them. Thank the muses! I started drawing with a driftwood dip pen and some of my handmade, Garry oak gall ink. I quickly realized some of my cards needed to be knocked back with a layer of white gesso–or any white paint–in order make the background fainter and easier to work on. So I gessoed over what I had just done, which unintentionally created a pleasing background ghost image, and I started again.

Oh, the glorious feeling when a dry spell ends and inspiration hits. When it happens to me, I turn the music up and it’s dance party time in the studio. The very first dance party in the new studio, come to think of it.

But even artists visited by the muses have to do house chores, and the next day I had to take the garbage out to the end of the drive. We are lucky enough to have a long winding driveway though a forested area, and the big leaf maple leaves are turning a glorious golden colour right now. It was weirdly warm with a light wind, which made everything seem surreal and just a bit witchy. I came upon a chunk of black, burned cedar wood with a knothole. I picked it up and peered thoroughly the hole, half-hoping it would become a portal to seeing things normally invisible. On the walk back I spotted a fallen maple leaf with a really interesting insect chewed hole.

I took both items back to the studio and they inspired a flurry of work that afternoon, and well into the evening, using the reworked cards. In the cut up paper pile were old eucalyptus ink wash tests and failed anthotypes that were a near perfect match, colour-wise, for the maple leaf. A word I’d recently learned* drifted back to me—incaustum— meaning “burnt in”. Latin for the origin of the word ink.

Maybe that piece of burnt cedar was a portal after all.

*From the book; Materials of Medieval Painting by Daniel V. Thompson

“The  colouring-matter of the iron inks is formed to a large extent in the fibres of the paper or parchment after use by oxidation which takes place after writing or painting. They are, so to speak, burnt in; and the world “ink” comes from the Latin incaustum, which means “burnt in. The French encre and Italian inchiostro, from the same root, show us how widely and how deeply these “burnt in” black iron salts entrenched themselves in the speech as well as in the practice of medieval Europe.