Origins...

I had, with perhaps less than honorable intentions, been buying other people's paintings for a while.  The first time I picked up a painting in order to destroy it was at a nearby auction house.  I had shown the painting to the couple of artist-types I was with, and the response was less than positive.  Bad painting, nice big canvas.  What if I bought this for cheap, I thought, and then covered it with gesso.  Then it would just be "nice big canvas", which, if purchased new, would have been brutally expensive.  After all, this wasn't an art auction.  This painting was in a lot with Nascar posters, dusty mirrors, and other junk people were just trying to sell for a quick buck in order to avoid paying fees at the local dump.  So I bought it.  For one dollar.  And from that point on, if I saw a painting at a thrift store, Goodwill, auction, or yard sale that looked like someone had followed along with a few episodes of Bob Ross, I would buy it cheap and repurpose it for my own art.

I found a painting at a yard sale with a $1.00 sticker on it, and proceeded to nab it.  It fit all my criteria, but for some reason, this one seemed somehow "better" than other landscapes I had picked up before.  It had an ominous purpleness to it - somewhat moody, with mountains in the distance and a large, empty pool of water in the foreground.  The landscape itself almost created a frame, the center of which, I felt, was notably absent a subject.  So for the first time, I decided not to destroy a cheap landscape painting, but to finish it.

I took it home and painted a sea serpent weaving in and out of the pool, trying to subtly incorporate my own work into this other nameless person's.  I was, in a sense, working with another painter who was completely unaware of our collaboration.  From that point on, I started looking for empty landscapes to "finish" rather than any cheap painting I could whiteout with gesso.

This space will include other people's paintings (that I have painted monsters, etc. into), and some of my other, random explorations with art.