Seven paintings on reclaimed wood panels that started with someone else’s work
I didn’t buy a single panel for this series.
Every board in Unquiet Ground came from another artist’s studio. Seven reclaimed wood panels, already painted — layered, scraped, worked over, not even finished – just discarded as not good enough as far as she was concerned. Somebody else’s colors. Somebody else’s marks. Somebody else’s decisions about where the weight of a composition ought to sit.
I could have primed straight over all of it and started clean. But I didn’t.
These reclaimed wood panels were never blank
There’s a story we artists sometimes tell about the blank canvas, and how frightening it is, and how brave you have to be to make the first mark. I’ve never quite believed that. What actually stops people isn’t emptiness, it’s the pressure to make the first mark be the right one.
A used panel takes that pressure and throws it out the window. Somebody already ruined it. Somebody already made a hundred decisions I didn’t agree with. I’m not starting anything — I’m answering.
That’s the whole ground the series is built on, and it’s why the work is called what it’s called. The ground under these paintings is not settled. There’s another painting under every one of them, still pushing up.
Scrubbing back until something shows up
The first real move was subtraction. Water, a rag, a scraper — I’ve been using a grocery store gift card because it has exactly the right amount of give — and I took the old images down until they went quiet. Not gone. Quiet.
Then a pale veil went over the top. Thin white acrylic, dragged and scraped rather than brushed, so the history underneath came through in patches. Every bruise-colored shadow you see in the finished work is another hand. I never covered it completely. I just turned the volume down until I could hear my own voice.
Working live, unplanned, in front of whoever’s watching
I painted parts of this series in live studio video sessions. No script, no plan, no editing out the parts where I made things up as I went.
People ask me why I work this way, and honestly: it shows the whole of the creation. When you don’t cut the footage, you don’t pretend the work arrived fully formed, through some magical process only a chosen few can access. You also can’t stall forever. The work has to move when a session is running, and that’s a more honest, and useful, way to work.
It’s also the part that matters most to me. The art world industry sells you the finished object and the story of how it came to be in a cloud of inspiration and hides the layers of not-so-pretty and uncertain work. I’d rather show you the not-pretty part. That’s the actual work of creating.
The forms found me, I didn’t design them
I didn’t set out to paint these pods and orbs. I came to the work not knowing, and what kept showing up were forms that hover between plant, insect, cell, and body. Pods. Spiracles. Things with lashes. Things swelling. Things about to split.
They’re botanical, but they’re not any plant you could look up. They’re a biology that doesn’t exist yet. I spend a lot of time outside in the mountains, forests and fields, and The Creation has a way of handing you shapes you didn’t know to ask for. My hands know things about a pods and seeds and fruits that I can’t explain to you in words.
Once the first forms arrived, they started to take on life by building them up in layers: acrylic, water-soluble crayon, drawn line, more scraping, a spray bottle of thinned paint when a surface got too tidy and needed something random.
When a painting gets too literal
The one thing I had to keep watching for was legibility as an actual thing. The moment a form reads clearly as a flower, the painting tightens and deadens. It stops being unsettled and becomes decoration.
So several of these were physically, and vigorously, reworked mid-process: scrubbed back down and rebuilt because they’d gotten too tidy and obvious. Here’s one of those, before and after.
It’s a small difference in a photograph. In the room it’s the difference between a painting that looks alive and a painting that just sits there.
Speaking the names
Every title is one word with Latin or biological roots, and I chose all of them by saying them out loud in an empty studio – a little like a lunatic.
Germinal. Propagule. Spiracle. Spinescent. Relict. Tumescent. Diaspore.
Sound decided it as much as meaning. I wanted words that had a percussive and slightly confrontational sound, precise enough to look up, and strange enough to stick with you afterward. Not clever. Not poetic in the mushy sense. Just exact and a little unfamiliar.
One of them got renamed. Marcescent became Relict once I said the whole list in order and realized I had too many –escent endings crowding each other. Relict – a survivor left behind by its own kind fit the painting better anyway.
Read straight through, the seven titles work as a found poem, which is why they get the centerfold in the catalog rather than a caption line.
The one that was cut
There were originally eight finished paintings. Ocellate was the eighth, and it’s not in the series.
Nothing’s wrong with it. It just wasn’t having the same conversation as the other seven. Putting it in would have made just eight paintings; leaving it out made a cohesive series. Cutting finished work is one of the hardest habits to build and one of the most useful. It makes the final body of work more vigorous and alive.
Edges, backs, no frame necessary
Every panel is painted and finished on all four edges and on the back, with hanging hardware mounted directly. No frame. No glass. No matting, no float mount, nothing that turns the painting into an object that needs a professional to install it.
I’ve noticed that this is unusual, and I know it makes the work harder to place in a gallery context. Good. These aren’t made for a gallery. They’re made to come out of a box and go on a wall in somebody’s actual house, with one nail and no permission from anybody. Real art, in real hands, in the real world.
That’s not a marketing blurb. It’s what I believe art is for.
Finding the order on the floor
The final sequence isn’t the order I painted them. I laid them all out on the studio floor and moved them around until they made sense visually: color weight, where the density sits, which piece needs to complete the thought of the one before.
You can’t do that on a screen. Thumbnails lie to you about scale and they lie to you about color. It took an hour or so of shuffling boards around like a card game, and Germinal ended up leading because it’s the beginning of everything and it announces the palette.
The catalog: keeps them together
Here’s the thing I had to solve. These paintings are going out into the world as gifts: given away, scattered, sent to people I may never meet. Once that starts, the series stops existing as a series. Seven separate paintings in seven separate places.
So I made a catalog. Twelve pages in full color and printed properly.
It holds the whole series: a page for each painting with its dimensions and a one-line definition, the opener, the seven titles set as a found poem across the centerfold, and the back cover. I’m printing far more copies than there are paintings, on purpose. The paintings scatter. The document doesn’t.
Where they’re actually going, and how, is another, still unfinished story.
The Seven
All seven are mixed media – acrylic, Stabilo Woody crayon, and drawn line – on reclaimed wood panel, finished on edges and back.
That crayon link is an Amazon affiliate link — if you buy through it I earn a few cents at no extra cost to you. I only link to things I actually use.
Seven paintings on boards somebody else gave up on, made in front of anyone who wanted to watch, named out loud in an empty room, finished on all six sides so they never need a frame or a gatekeeper.
If you’ve got a stack of somebody else’s abandoned work in your studio, or a painting you’ve been treating as ruined — what would you make if you decided it was already ruined and you couldn’t possibly make it worse?
You shine!
Monette
Shiny Designs · Western North Carolina