WHEN THE OLD IS NEW

Several months ago I made the decision to do a series of paintings depicting barns and farms utilizing a wide variety of mediums and working in extreme ranges of size.  I thought it would be fun, and I have not been disappointed.  Despite a few failures and miss-steps, I have been pleased with the results.  But there has been one unanticipated twist that has been especially gratifying...finding a new life for old forgotten work.

During my first few years in Paducah I worked extensively with my clay "press", producing an incredible number of mono types, either totally abstract or a combination of abstract and realism. The nature of the process of clay printing results in multiple discards for every successful print, and being a pack rat by nature, I saved almost every one of those discards, filing them away in some corner of the studio or buried under a pile of papers in a file drawer.

This is not the first time I've resurrected the discarded clay print; that occurred about 6 years ago when I began working with oil pastels on old prints.  Several years later, after my Italian experience, I began to use them as background for architectural drawings with markers and ink.  But in recent months I've found an even new use for these remnants of the past, incorporating their colors and composition in a series of small mixed media paintings.

Red orange landscape...oil pastel on clay mono type...13x15"

Big Red...clay drawing...13x28

Lavender sky...pastel on clay

And the two most recent pieces:

 pastel and markers on clay...5x8

soft pastels and oil pastels on clay...5x8

My supply of these old prints is just about exhausted and I am thinking about producing a new series of clay prints with the intention of using them as background for more of these mixed media paintings.  It will be interesting to see how this works out.