Sustainable Growths: Painting with Recycled Materials

Abstract

Through my project, Sustainable Growths: Painting with Recycled Materials, I will explore, document and combine the ordinarily disparate aesthetic worlds of painting, vernacular architectural design, and handmade crafts. My long-term aims with this body of work are to create visual catalogs of particular regions of the world, to give birth to new visual forms that stem from the language of painting, to continue to employ sustainable methods in the production of my works, and to encourage reflection on human interaction with the planet’s ecosystems. I consider myself part of a generation of young painters who are reinvigorating painting for the 21st century by expanding the materials and vocabulary of painting. I work with recycled non-traditional materials that I repurpose into paintings, which I install on architectural structures such as walls. My previous work has generated international attention with exhibitions and reviews in Germany, France, Italy, Greece, Mexico and the United States. I expect this new body of work to have even more impact on the discipline of painting by demonstrating additional new possibilities for the materials, forms, locations, and content of painting. Starting with small-scale studio works composed of deconstructed crafts with fake flora and community detritus; I will expand my repertoire of abstract forms. Connected to the painted mark (brush stroke), each new creation will build on the structures and colors of the previous forms. As I collect materials from second-hand stores, yard sales, artists’ studios and walks, I will document them in photographs. In this way, the project has an archaeological character as a survey of the everyday aesthetic expressions of people from specific cities. As my collection of recycled materials builds, I will use the items as the fabric of the site-specific paintings that I design and install. When composing the installations, the interplay of form, color and texture with the selected architectural site will determine the composition. My goal is to transform the collected materials into new visual forms. The large-scale outdoor installations may suggest natural plant growths on the outside of buildings from a distance. Instead of replicating any particular species of the vegetal world, the installations will be inventive metaphors of organic forms. Through my use of collected materials, my investigation will not only point to the creative efforts of many, but will also reduce my carbon footprint. In this way, Sustainable Growths: Painting with Recycled Materials is an artistic endeavor with anthropological and ecological undercurrents.