Saturday, May 9, 2009

Recycling an old painting

Often in my studio work, I will decide to do some painting and realize that I have many unfinished starts to paintings lying around. I know I should finish these pieces, but when it comes down to it, some of them I just won't ever get the excitement back into it. So what to do with these paintings that have started, yet never been realized. Well, today I re-energized one of the them and started a new painting right over the top! What better way to recycle and reuse than to paint over existing work! As you can see by these two images, the image has drastically changed from one of a landscape to a closeup of some of the flowering cacti that I came across a couple of weeks ago. I don't know why these cacti have kept my attention, but for some reason I have to paint them. So look for updates in the next few weeks as the progress on these continue. Now I just have to decide if it is going to be a chunky painting done with a palette knife or a work with brush. PS, the first image I had already started sketching a couple of lines when I decided to take the picture, so sorry I don't have an image of the old piece without any new lines over it.


5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Heh heh, in the first picture it appears as though you wrote the word "Boo" on it, like you were heckling it out of disappointment. That makes the recycling bit kind of funny. Or maybe I'm just easily entertained...

Anyway, love the new piece!

Nina Crittenden said...

Me, too! Very "green"

cynthia said...

Great idea to recycle paintings!

I think I have more than a few canvases I should paint over this summer.

Shawn McCann said...

Thanks Christina. I never saw that until you mentioned. Maybe it was my inner self saying it sucked! I think the new piece is much better though!

Shawn McCann said...

Thanks Nina and Cynthia. Its nice to recycle them rather than throwing them away. Much cheaper too!