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Thursday 29 November 2012

Trash or Treasure

When my son was young he often arrived home from school with his pockets loaded with what I would call "trash" and I would admonish him about picking things up off the ground because they were dirty and germ laden or they could be dangerous. To him they were "treasures".

I was thinking about this and chuckling to myself as I was walking home from the grocery store one day after having picked up the milk that I had forgotten to purchase earlier in the day when I was grocery shopping. Instead of looking at the neighbourhood yards and landscape and enjoying the change of the seasons as I would normally do, my eyes were glued to the pavement beneath my feet. Why? I was searching for "treasures" or more correctly "trash". I've come to see the value in my son's homebound pastime. I've been using found items in my art recently. Found items are interesting things like rusty metal washers, flattened bottle tops, pop can tabs, or interesting seed pods, small stones etc. I've even added these things to my Christmas list of wants.

I no longer see these things as "trash" but I see the potential for them to liven up a piece of art. Now I am kicking myself for having made my son get rid of his "treasures".


Some of my "treasures"
 I had the opportunity to work on my Algonquin Park painting again and have filled in the foreground and continued work on the water and the reflections. Reflections always appear darker in the water than the actual thing they are reflecting. I will also have to darken the water slightly.


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