Found Art (not in the traditional sense)

I've told you what was lost, now I will show you what is found. See what a difference a really good digital camera can make?!

This was a sunset done in oil pastel on posterboard. Was a class project. I kinda like it..it's soft and whispy. It hung on the bulletin board for a little while at school as well.


I believe this was done in Art 20. We used a lot of different mediums that year, many I hadn't tried before. It was one of my favorite classes...we did everything from just sit outside and draw what we saw, to really unconventional things...we had guest instructors and a lot of freedom to create whatever we wanted in whatever way we wanted.

This is a very large drawing...poster board it's drawn on...all in graphite. LOL The Metallica logo is in pencil crayon. My son...asked me, "You had those shiny pencils when you were a kid?" LOL the mouths of babes....LOL...

Took a really long time to finish, and a lot of pencils LOL I guess I must have been really bored. In all honesty, I'm glad that I still have this one..it's hanging in my basement now.

This was done as another school project. I think this is the second try at it though, I don't know what happened to the first one. It had been hanging on the bulletin board at school and if I remember, someone scribbled on it... That one had the word "silence" pieced together right in the middle and was painted gold...silence is golden, get it??

Anyway, I liked the idea enough to recreate it and this is now hanging in my basement with my kid's school artwork :D

Erm, can you tell who my favorite band was at the time? LOL

What can I say? It's Acrylic, my favorite medium. You can't really see it well here, but in the middle box, with the big white splotch, that is a drawing of the electric chair on the cover of "Ride the Lightning" that I was going to paint, but the guest instructor suggested that I just paint over it with clear acrylic sealer (I think) to preserve it. It's kind of striking, really...:P

I still, really really like this painting. Labour of love and a lot of fun to do. I still want to frame it, but not just any old way...I need to have built a wood frame, and then I want to stick little rubber grommets all over it, to look like rivets and paint the whole thing a tarnished silver color...Heavy Metal...get it? :P Yeah...Let's carry on, shall we??

This one had probably at least 3 other paintings underneath it...I don't quite remember what but I do think it was a lot of "hands on" art LOL handprinty stuff...can still see some of the stuff around the edge of the black...and the topmost painting was done with my hands and nails to scratch out some texture. I believe this one was done with fabric paint....LOL

Ohhh the teenage angst...LOL I did this one when I was dating my first boyfriends...one of the last few that I did during that time. I kinda don't really like it but he did kill the art in me...and the one that came after him didn't help either. Come to think of it, my last, few, best (MISSING) paintings, I created after I met my husband.

Done in Art 30, some kind of watercolor paper and watercolor paint. A watercolor artist, I am not...I use far too much paint and don't get that washy feeling...ever. I prefer nice, goopy acrylics if I paint.

One of my attempts to capture the elusive perfect sunset. My room's one window faced the..umm..west? well..the direction the sun sets in. I still remember how beautiful some of them were... I would sit on my bed and watch the sun set, trying to memorize every detail if I saw a particularily beautiful one one night....sometimes, I would draw in the glow of the setting sun. Living in the city now I don't get to see very many.

This was one of a few art 20 projects where we all had to do the same thing. We had the best teacher ever. For each unit--pencil, paint, still life, portraits--he would have us all use the same source for the first work and then we would have to submit our own creations, 8 in all, for that unit. His reasoning was that instead of comparing us to each other, he had a basic idea of our style and then use that one work as a basis to compare the rest of our work. He was bar none the best teacher anyone could ask for.

My impression of it...I like the colors. I like bright colors with lots of contrast and I like the way that the black emphasizes the colors. Again, watercolors, not that you can tell. On whatever paper Mr. Black gave us LOL

This one....acrylics... oh lord did it give me grief. I was going to paint the trees seperating the houses on the property where I grew up (you can still kind of see an outline of a painting underneath) and then I hated that so I painted over it and well..this came out. I really don't know...something celestial, as there are little stars all over the background (the gold specks).

Another Acrylic. I had a few drawings on this same theme. Our universe basically..I was reading a lot of astronomy and astrology books (did you know one of the moons of Uranus has my name? I feel so honored :P) and that influenced some of what I was creating at the time. I wanted to create something out of my own head. So here it is...all mine. LOL yet again, celestial..this time a representation of our chunk in space.

My crowning, but unfinished achievement..so far :P

I'm really lucky to have had parents that would let me use my bedroom door as the ultimate canvas...LOL Especially, the origional door, in a 75+year old farm house.

Um..yeah, I'm a disney freak. I started this after graduation and in that in between time when I really didn't know what I was doing...just painting helped me through a rough time. I worked on it through the years, including at 8 mos pregnant with my first son, at home from college over Christmas Break...LOL I want to finish it someday, but I don't know if that will be possible. They're hard to see but there are half painted characters from The Little Mermaid, and also Mufasa from The Lion King in the bottom panel. I had imagined the whole thing covered from top to bottom. And no, I did not trace or project any of them, they're all freehand. ( I got asked that a lot over the years)

So..these are the pieces of myself, my life, my work that I can physically put my hands on if I so choose to. So many of the things that I created back then were an outlet for pain. Drawing and painting, when coupled with the music that touched my soul, were my outlet and my drug... they were the cure for the things that I felt were tearing me apart inside. I could lose myself for hours just in they eyes of the model for my portrait...I could put my emotion on that canvas and it would not need to live in me any longer. I could escape. These are the last remnants of those moments and days and years.

In the years that came after, the reason I stopped drawing and painting and creating was, I have come to see, is that it just became easier not to feel anything. I didn't realize how numb I had become. Without that, there was no art. There was no need for it. Not that there was no reason... there were some hard years in between but somehow just...no drive. Not feeling the pain that was there, and no channeling it into something good.

I don't fully understand any of this myself, I'm just trying to work it all out... My best friend asked me if I'm crazy after reading my last entry (Cara, you should know better than anyone else!) and maybe...maybe not. I just am me I guess. And for this moment in time, there's just something that it's becoming clear to me needs to be dealt with, like it or not and maybe right now is the perfect time to find art again.