I have a habit, as you may know, of collecting paintings from thrift stores and adding to them. Here’s my most recent work, featuring some folks playing ghosts in a nice swamp.
I have a distinct memory of realising how adding into found paintings could work. I had seen it online and around, but it had not occurred to me as something I could do. I was in a bar in San Francisco, waiting for a pint to be poured. Above the bartender was hung a large painting of a swampy forest in that orange-fall palette, which I always associate with the 70s. Some subsequent painter had added a large tentacled monster emerging from the swamp.
The pub was busy, so I had some time to really look at the painting. By the time I got my beer, I had committed myself to finding some paintings to play with when I got back to Ottawa. That was something like 2014 or 15. Waaay back. My first works along these lines featured lots of ghosts building things. I started calling it “Hacked Art”, but I’m sure there’s a different name for whatever I was doing.
Since then, what gets added has evolved, and my ability to blend my own contributions has slowly improved. A lot of art making is basically looking and thinking about what to do next. With a blank canvas, it can be hard. With someone else’s painting, you really need to consider your moves. It takes a little bit of time to figure out the rhythm, light, movement in a painting. Then I need to figure out what little story I want to tell.
This most recent piece is a reflective of both my love of ghosts and my desire to work more colour and depth into my paintings. The colour palette of the original is a bit drab, and I wanted to brighten it up a bit. I also wanted to keep the subject matter simple (as simple as I can get, anyway). No gods, no monsters, no magic. Just figures in bedsheets in a swamp. I told you: simple.
