Many years ago the owner of high end, period furniture store and gallery stopped by my studio for a visit. Although he enjoyed my work he thought that an exhibit of paintings would distract too much from the store’s focus, the furniture. As he was leaving the studio he noticed a painted figure hanging up in the corner. It was a piece that I had cut out of a painting that was damaged after being accidentally torn. I ended up cutting up the canvas into smaller canvases but kept whatever figurative fragments that I could. I initially dismissed the piece as nothing consequential but he said if I had more of them maybe we could build a show around them and hand them up around the furniture as installations. And that was that.
I eventually created a whole gallery of these figures that were suspended in different configurations amidst the furniture and all over the gallery. It was like walking into a theater full of the actors `in tableau. After the exhibit closed the question was what to do with all the pieces. They were too big to place in file drawers and to flimsy to store upright so I decided the next best place would be to sandwich them between the beds and mattresses in our house. And that’s where they remained undisturbed for the next 20 years.
A couple months ago, I decided to revisit them and discovered that that some had not aged well, some were in need of repair, still others were in reasonably good shape. I was going put them away again but then it occurred to me that, in actuality, these pieces had actually anticipated my work with collage by a good decade. In many cases I had glued various pieces of canvas together to create collages. Suddenly I began to see these pieces in a new light.
I brought them all down into my studio and began to repair, repaint, and rework each one, not really knowing what I would do with them when I finished. I just knew they needed some new ‘love’ after so many years of being hidden away. I ended up building some bases that allowed me to set them up as freestanding pieces and within a short time my studio was becoming more and more crowded as more and more figures began to assemble.
I call them ‘Walk Abouts’ and for now and for the time being, and for the sake of my very limited space I have suspended them all together on a clothes line. And there they will remain until a new venue finds them. It’s better than being sandwiched under mattress any day.