mish-mash – Mixy's Art Blog

Day 24. More slicing n dicing Here’s a thing I’ve come to notice, these oversized numbers. Featuring on most days, but not premeditated. Sometimes it’s a starting point, sometimes it’s a finishing touch, but they keep cropping up.
Day 25. Layers of acrylics and guache, and offcuts from another thing I’m juggling about with. Subtle in clear gesso, but still sizable numerals. In a more thinky moment I pondered their presence, accounting for it as a balance of order to the free fall chaos out there in the world.
Day 26. The 6 is cut from black gesso-ed thin copy paper and has a wrinkly plastic feeling. The numbers are both edged with scribbled mutterings.
Day 27. Some days consist of bits and bobs straying over the the recent past, culminating in something altogether ‘the same but different’, a familiar view from a new angle.
Day 28 In a mad fit of efficiency I recently sorted through all my colors – paints, inks, crayons, pens – into boxes of the same hue. Working in a small space means any space saved by putting stuffs away sometimes is revelatory. It also means that when the box of purples/pinks is out, then there’s a color theme decided until I’m ready for a change 😉

Serendipity [noun] “an aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident.”

I think this sums up so much of what I do. Yesterday’s post about recycling was a tangent I wandered down when thinking about how the collage pieces I make come into being.

Paper is readily recyclable these days (indeed it’s often recycled when it’s ‘new’) but I like to get every last ounce of use out of it. Once it’s been printed on (both sides) with info that’s no longer needed, it retires to a life in art.

Images and pictures, blocks of color or gradients, maps, poetry, lyrics, photos, scanned doodles and sketchbook pages, mish-mashed up in photoshop, I let fate take over and set the printer running. And if there are gaping spaces left, the page gets turned around and over-printed again. Serendipity occurs!

The ones that don’t happen into something immediately usable cover my work table to take on new nuances with splashed color, and as testing grounds for paints and inks and stampings. Or used to soak up excess color from dying fabrics and threads (I think this must be where the great paper-dying project originated… one idea bears fruit and blossoms into new ideas and schemes and badly mixed metaphors!)