Shameless Stealing - or Clever Appropriations and Recycling?

The kiln is now loaded with relief sculptures, miniature vases and a cache of lidded pots. They’ll be fired over the next few days, then smoke fired next week. The corner of the room where I was working on these has been swept clean. Pottery tools have been washed and put away. My creative corner has been turned into a small painting studio once more. I begin again with mixed media acrylic paint and paper collages. The first one goes way back.


When I was a teenager, I used to draw and paint highly delineated botanical studies. Sometimes I would study amphibians and insects as well. I still possess a few examples of these naturalist renderings. While working on my reinterpretation of Chinese folk art I found an early study in acrylic on paper of a nasturtium. In an act of irreverent and shameless stealing from my youth I cut it out and pasted it on to a piece of primed paper and painted around it. Thank you fourteen year old Janet, I’ll take that.

It is probably the last time I’ll work with something that goes back that far into early artistic pursuits - although I know I have a page of studies of vegetables and insects somewhere that I am itching to do something with. Think I’ll leave it alone though. I have other stealing to do from Chinese folk artists who made innocent paper cuts.