I often cogitate on items that pile up in the back of a desk drawer, psychically and actually, little forgotten things, cast-offs, marginalia, ephemera, detritus, afterthoughts, odds ‘n’ ends, doodles made during phone calls, etc. After several months of painting sticks and dowels I needed a break, a common reactive about-face for many of us. What if I created a piece using items like these that I’ve got lying around in folders and in the back of my mind desk? So I did. I’m rather pleased with the result. I like to think it honors and elevates the worth and beauty of quickly-forgotten stuff, or at least the items that found their way into this piece.
“Rescue Collector” - mixed media on canvas, 14” x 20” x 2” - 2020.
The circular “buttons” are reliefs made from the excess paint that accrues in my plastic palette tray over time, dried acrylic normally tossed that at some point I noticed looked pretty cool when I peeled it off the tray. Generative art I hadn’t realized I was making. To keep the semicircles from collapsing I poured resin into the painted plastic palate and chiseled out the dried forms to use in the future for...something. I kept them in a cardboard box. As I made more buttons over time, I introduced a bit of intentionality here and there, painting directly on my tray receptacles. The buttons often emerge looking like semi-precious stones, or planets from space. They look like something to be collected. I gave them each names.
The buttons made their first appearance in my piece “The Beatles”, which, come to think of it, was a bit of a trial run for “Rescue Collector’ in terms of my process.
“The Beatles” - mixed media on panel, 2019
In “Rescue Collector,” a now barely seen grid of earth tones was originally to be a field of little frames for each button in the collection, but they came out looking like an ugly sweater from the 1970’s, so I put several washes of the palest greens, purples, and Iridescences over it. Getting there. Then I thought to cover the surface with ink transfers from other saved ephemera, mainly my ink doodling cut out from notebooks/other discarded false starts, along with some of my dad’s crumbling sheet music (some Chopin in this piece, complete with dad’s scribbled-in fingering markings). I even made some more small doodles when I ran out of appropriate older ones to use. To make an ink transfer, I affixed the paper with the image on it to the canvas with clear acrylic medium, and when it dried, wet it and carefully rub off the paper, destroying the original in the process. A bit odd to spend a few hours making a drawing to then destroy it, but I guess a Buddhist monk mandala mindset is the way to go in this instance. Not all the ink from the originals survived the rubbing. The fragility and entropy are present at creation, as it were. Cool. I then added colored pencil to the background, a bit of a nod to my coloring book period. I was just trying to create some depth with all of this for the buttons to float upon and it came out so well that I may attempt a larger piece with this process, sans buttons. I I like how the ink transfer process reverses an image, creating a kind of through-the-looking-glass-into-the-past effect. I’ve used my dad’s piano sheet music in a bunch of my artwork over the last 8 or so years. It keeps him and his music present in my life. I’ve lost several family members over the past decade and so it seems inevitable that the vagaries of memory have become a theme in some of my recent work.
Increasingly, I’m paying attention to the side edges of my pieces. Highlighting the typically liminal. They’re part of a viewers experience, after all. Gives you something extra to consider when you’re laying on the couch looking up at it. Unseen continuations made visible. Anyway, my little ode to memory, underdog feelings, and up-cycling.
A word about the titles. I collect them. They’re little word baubles rescued/trash-picked/harvested from my fleeting, daily encounters with them; in print, passing conversations, the ether in my head. Some become song titles, some art titles, some lay in wait for their chance to be known. I used to use them in song lyrics, when I was writing lyrics for my bands with singers. Maybe again someday. When I assemble them in a list, they read like kooky Dadaist poetry. For “Rescue Collector” I printed out a bunch, cut them into little specimen labels, and tried to match them with the buttons, essentially treating each button as an individual work of art to be named. Not quite like naming discarded hair weaves one finds in the gutter, but perhaps close.
In reading order they are:
Return Audio Device
Novelty Bias
Burner Phone
Stick The Landing
Appears Larger
Charged Particle
Raised Eyebrow
Gas Giant
More Heat than Light
Bird Colors
Flat Meaning
Continuity Error
Optimal Flavor Profile
Makeshift
Trouble Ticket
Joy Fatigue
Babblefield
Luxury Metadata
Lost Noise
Relaxation Tape
Mind Room
Rare Visitor from Eurasia
Butter Notes
Eyeball It
Story Checks Out
Long Haulers
Misprint
Bottle Cap
Friend Typing
Hard Want