You may well ask how am I making old work new? Old is old! But it is not so when I have turned my attention to unfinished or somehow unsatisfactory older drawings or prints. My Autumn project is to clean, reduce, and reuse in my studio. After more than 25 years of making art this work will last weeks or months. So I continue to plug away.
Currently I am working my way through my huge flat file cabinet, which has several drawers absolutely stuffed with drawings and prints of all sizes. Work on paper is not improved by my haphazard careless storage system.
I file the best of these in recently purchase folios where they will be better protected. So far I have no system, other than size. But I will know my art will be better protected from damage.
Not a few will get new life under my circle cutters. I have two crunching circle cutters: a two inch and a 2.5 inch cutter. Interesting and intricate work that is nonetheless unsatisfactory will become many fine small circles. I have used some of these circles in other art works, and some have been glued together over tiny LED bulbs on wire strings. These LEDs are available with small batteries (needing fairly frequent replacement), or now with USB plugs that can be used with plug in adapters (aka plug in phone chargers). This is a game changer for those of us unwilling to deal with batteries! Eventually I will have so many circles to use in new projects!
In this process I have found quite a few drawings and prints that I deem worthy but unfinished đŸ˜‰ . Now I make this another opportunity to make old work new! Generally I add color with colored pencil, pen, watercolor, pastel or even ink via my computer and archival printer. Sometimes the work is transformed more radically using digital manipulation.
Here are a few examples of adding color and digital transformation I use to make my old work new: