The secret gallery’s blog

You don’t need to spend any money to make art, sometimes you could just reach for the spice rack and rummage around the kitchen in search of inspiration. Maybe you could even eat it too! You can use out of date spices that have been sitting in the cupboard for 10 years! Food colouring for that green St Patrick’s Day Leprechaun’s hat cake you made a long time ago!

Last night, while one of our children slept, refusing to wake up from a nap, I started to cut up pizza boxes for our wide awake daughter to paint on. Usually the thing that puts me off painting with our children or letting them paint on their own is the amazing mess they make! It is such an ordeal, changing clothes first, constantly cleaning paint off them and everything else around them. I am a bit silly I suppose letting them paint with my oil paints! So I reached for the turmeric, paprika and soy sauce, three wizened potatoes a couple of reused plastic containers and the  biscuit and grey squares from the recycled pizza boxes, I find this better than paper for children to paint on as it is tough and does not get all scrupled up. I cut out some shaped to make potato prints with my well loved Swiss army knife. I forgot that when you print it comes out in reverse, be warned!

I just realised that I should have used the pastry brush instead of the normal paint brush, to make this a completely pure kitchen art experience for our daughter! There are many more things in the kitchen to paint, print or sculpt with. Once, I made brown bread horses, and hung them off a tree for birds to eat, maybe that with be the next kitchen art project we could do. James has been teaching them to cook so they are pretty knowledgeable on spices and cooking ingredients now! Our three and a half year old made a great curry last week and our two and a half year old made a tasty Risotto!! 

Today the wind

greets the grass

with sea foam

or is it snow

I am obsessed by painting, I paint almost everything! I like to paint on canvas but the contents of the recycling bin work well too! All you need is a primer of half emulsion paint and half PVA glue mixed. When it has dried you have a surface you can paint on, in oil paint if you like. I like the oddness of painting in oils on unexpected materials as well as how rich the oil paint looks, in contrast to the flat skim of mass produced designs associated with packaging. This particular series stemmed from a dream I had, and then I expanded on it. I can’t go into any more detail for the moment!

I wrote/painted this haiku poem today on one of the objects I found to paint on. I like the way these pieces cross over between: paintings, poems, sculpture, instillation, and potentially, rituals, interventions, happenings and more, and all from an every day recycled vessel, designed to be thrown away after use. Humble materials are often overlooked, but sometimes they rock!  

The mysterious rock-like substance in the beach that seemed to eat up the rubbish, as if it were lava

“What science finds to be nonexistent, we must accept as nonexistent, but what science merely does not find is a completely different matter. …It is quite clear that there are many, many, mysterious things.” Dalai Lama

Yesterday I was reading my Google reader which is like a personalized news paper, it is amazing! James set it up for me, now all I have to do is click two buttons every day and I have as much or as little as I want to read about every day. Yesterday, it lead me to Gerhard Richter’s artist’s statement. The bit that caught my short attention span probably because it resonated with me, was where he said how when painting his abstract works he did not start a painting with a predetermined vision in mind, but over many applications of paint up to 20 or so sometimes when something became recognisable, emerging almost organically through the paint then he would stop painting it. According to him his work forms from structures and ideas around him, nothing more profound than that. He has a dislike of any doctrine preferring nature without the prejudices that people have. Maybe that is why he paints as if imitating nature itself.

Why is there thought to be such a separation between the ordinary and the mysterious or profound, is it not a seamless continuation?           

Maybe Human           Marianne Potterton   2009                        oil on canvas

You might recognise this painting from the last post. After a few scary moments as I let our  children determine the direction the painting was going, I much prefer it now to how it was. I painted with our 2 and 3 year old and learned to be freer and really enjoy the actual act of painting, not thinking about painting but just simply painting! I brought the painting together at the end with a unifying swirling green and flurries of cherry petals falling!

Beautiful Fly               Marianne Potterton    2009                         Oil on canvas

Birds imitating flowers              Marianne Potterton  2009         Oil on canvas

Hearts and Flower Petals                  Marianne Potterton 2009 Oil on canvas

“Maybe Human”  Work in progress     Marianne Potterton         22 February 2009

Oil on canvas

Studio in The Secret Galley

The two paintings above are what I have been doing today. The larger one is a collaborative piece which was started off by our children a couple of days ago, I really like the contrast of the marks they make with my own. Other painting that they helped me with are “Merging” and “Horses in the Mist”.

When I stopped to look at this painting it reminded me of some of Marc Chagall’s paintings where there are creatures that are both animal and human. Chagall is one of my favorite painters.  Previously when I painted people I felt quite restricted, say compared to horses; as if people were supposed to look real but horses could be a bit strange and that was fine! There has been such a history of life painting and life drawing being very academic and so called correct. I think I had it drilled into me from my foundation course so I was almost afraid to paint people, or if I do it should not be fun! Today I have enjoyed dismantling that old limitation!

Peace to all