Recycling Photographs

Ocean - Acrylic on recycled photograph - Available at www.livefunky.etsy.com

I'm on a mission to go through all of my old printed photographs, organize them and put them in photo albums. I've got boxes and boxes of them, and of course they've all mixed together and it's a big old mountain of a headache. I am not the most efficient person in the world. An efficient person would have tossed out the duds in each set of photographs as he or she got them. Not I. I've lugged the boxes of years of pictures, good ones, bad ones and total duds from apartment to apartment, to my home to various storage locations in my home. All the while carefully moving several pounds of useless paper mixed in with the good ones. Crazy right? Ah the life of the pack rat. I'm really working on that right now though. Purging/donating anything I haven't used in six months has been a general rule. Obviously some things are sentimental and you'll never throw them out or give them away but those are rare items. Decluttering my home is decluttering my mind and I'm hooked on it now because it feels so much better. I've already got a very small house (that has five people and a big dog occupying it three days out of the week). Piles of STUFF have got to go! Getting rid of the extra useless stuff has opened my eyes to all the GREAT stuff I love and love to use. You know, like "Oh look, there's that sweater I haven't seen for months!" or "woo hoo! Here's the match to my favorite slippers!". I have a carload of perfectly good stuff that's going to Goodwill and that feels good too.

So back to the photos. I've learned that you need to get all of the junk out of the way before you have any hope of organizing, so I'm going through my photos and taking out all of the blacked out, blurry, repetitive and boring shots - everything that I'm not going to put in a photo album. These make great surfaces for painting and mixed media. I love the glossy finish and how it contrasts with a more matte finish of paint. It's eco friendly and it means I can work with what I've got instead of rushing out to the art supply shop for more.

Ocean was a photo I took several years ago in Florida. If you look closely (or click on the image for a larger view) you'll see that wider yellow band is actually the waves coming onto shore.