EXPERIMENTING WITH RUST

Thanks to an instructor, Diego Sanchez, I have been thinking about the surfaces of my canvases. Upon a suggestion I tried 'rusting' some canvas pieces. The story is, I went to the local car garage and asked if they might have some left over metal scraps and braced myself for some kind of shocked reply. To my surprise they did not make too much of a fuss about the odd request and led me to their spare parts area. A mechanic and myself rummaged through the drawers and found some great nuts and bolts...literally. He was helpful in that he showed me which ones had special coatings and would not rust...I am sure this saved me much time in that I did not try to rust items with this special coating :) Anyway, I took them home, found some scraps of canvas and then had some other ideas.

I added lots of tea. This link leads you to the Republic of Tea, as it is nice tea. Of course I would not add 'The Republic of Tea' but maybe some Lipton. Click the link for a good recipe. So anyway, I just poured straight from the tea bag on to the bits of canvas. Next, I went off with my two daughters into the woods to find berries. We had a lot of fun but did not come up with great berries...wrong time of year! So, we took the orange berries we had, went home and bashed them into the little pouches of nuts and bolts. They were then wrapped up, soaked with water (with some added salt, as the mechanic said this would help the rusting process) and buried. I left them for about a week or two that way and then out in the air for about a week.

These images are what came out of all this intriguing work. Click the image to enlarge, as you will see much better detail, and can appreciate the beauty in it more. You can be sure you will see this technique in more of my work!