The new header image of this website (above – although if you’re reading this (as is likely) more than a few weeks after the beginning of May 2015, it may not be above, because it will have been replaced by something else – therefore it’s also below:)
Anyway – the new header image (new as of May 3rd 2015) above is a photo of one of a series of acrylic abstracts painted about 4 years ago at the end of a pretty rubbish couple of years when the shop I was involved in got crushed by the after-effects of the global financial meltdown that first sneaked up on us in mid 2008.
I displayed the paintings on the blank walls of the almost empty shop in the absence of proper stock to flog. A few paintings did sell but to my shame I can’t remember which ones. Part of the reason for this is that a couple of tumultuous years and house moves later we took up residency in a small terrace where there was no room for all the paintings I’d accumulated 🙁 – (even more sadly there was also no room to paint), so I left them out in the back yard under sheets of tarpaulin – there were over a hundred, some quite large, like the one above which was 800 mm x 1000 mm or 32in x 40in.
A year later we had to move house again and when I examined the stored paintings I found (not surprisingly) that most of them had been damaged by damp and mould. We were moving to an even smaller place, so what to do?
Reluctantly I decided there was no choice other than to grit my teeth and dispose of them, in an environmentally-friendly way if possible. I took the paintings to the new place, which luckily had enough space behind the railings at the front of the house to store them while we completed the move.
When the time came a couple of days later, I cut out all the canvases from their wooden stretchers and rolled them up. I broke up the wood and piled it up along with the rolled-up canvases in the back of our small hatchback. I can’t remember how many trips it took but I drove the loads to the nearest council waste and recycling centre and tossed the constituent bits of the irreplaceable art into their respective skips.
Afterwards I felt relieved but sad. Each one of those one hundred or so paintings was unique and impossible to recreate. Maybe that’s what art is?
Anyway, they were just paintings.
Click here for a link to a previous piece about some of the artwork written at the time of the exhibition in the shop.
PS: We’ve just moved again to a nicer place, maybe the lost art will return . . .