Sustainability project

This series actually didn’t start off as a sustainability project, but it has quickly become one. Let’s start with a little storytime. A few years ago, I bought a plaster figurine of Nike of Samothrace which I thought was beautiful. I painted it with acrylics and it looked awesome.

Then I made a mistake.

I put the figurine (which is quite heavy) in my apartment because I wanted to look at it. But my cats had other plans and threw it off the shelf. Guess I just can’t have nice things with them…

Time passed by and I finally decided to glue it back together as I didn’t want to just throw it out. Because the glued parts looked ugly, I decided to give it a completely new look and poured some leftover paint on it and it looked awesome again.

Then I made another mistake.

I had displayed the figurine in my gallery window. One day, I was moving a big painting to get it photographed, and while doing so, I tipped over the figurine and it broke AGAIN.

Glued it, gave it another coat. Looks awesome. Has survived so far and someone is going to pick it up soon and bring it to safety :D When I told him the story he said that this would make the figurine even more valuable, and he told me that he loved that about the figurine - it has been through so much but looks perfect anyways. A great metaphor for many things in life.

My girlfriend has always loved the concept and when she came back from her family holiday she brought me a cute porcelain elefant. She found it at a flea market that was collecting donations for the flood catastrophe in the Ahrtal in Germany and she immediately thought of me. I decided to just put the elephant close to my canvas to catch flying paint that doesn’t land on my canvas when I’m doing my splash paintings. This is how he turned out:

We then started looking for more secondhand figurines at flea markets and eBay Kleinanzeigen and found great treasures there. So now these figurines have become my sustainability project because I want to use secondhand figurines that people do not want any more instead of buying new ones. I use them to catch excess paint that would otherwise just land on the floor and go to waste. Also, the figurines are a bit more on the affordable side and I would love to have people buy them that just can’t finance a painting but really want some of my art. That way, everyone including mother earth is happy!