In 2007 I was planning to travel to Switzerland to spend time with daughter and I was going to be away for 5 weeks. Although I was planning on doing little drawings, taking lots of photos and visiting galleries I knew “doing art” was out of the question but I still wanted to “do” something art wise.

So I hit on the idea of a “foundart series” but with me “losing “the art and the found part being someone else’s.

I spent 2 months working across older collages, reworking and layering what turned out to be “vessels” (vases and bowl shapes). I then cut the larger collages up creating small business card size artworks and worked on each one to create individual little gems.

2 examples here (read and see below how the works grew)

I began by working on old collage pieces, about 12 inches x 10 inches. This was one of them.

Using gouache I painted the edge of the board red bringing in the red covering some of the collage. Then I painted over all the colours using off-white gouache, creating vase and bowl shapes along rows.

This one shows you the board three quarter covered in its second coat of white gouache.

A close-up view of the bottom left-hand corner.

After a bit of shaping using white gouache I began to work on the shadow and the shaped vessels themselves. I then cut them up into business card sizes.

I placed a label on the back that said “FOUNDART SERIES – # you have found a small piece of art that is yours to keep.

Each was individually numbered, recorded and loaded onto the website as I “lost ‘ each piece beginning at Launceston airport in Tasmania, then Melbourne airport and Zurich.

The story of losing it, travel experiences and the feedback in part2 to follow.