What is upcycled vintage art?

 

So this all started when I was at a thrift shop, looking at an ugly, brown landscape painting. It was dirty, had a damaged frame, was very dated and lifeless. It was only $4. I suddenly felt a bit sad thinking that this poor little painting (which someone lovingly painted and was once very on trend) was now worth less than a cup of coffee.

It got me wondering what could be done to make it art to be appreciated again. The big open space in the middle of a lake was smooth, and would be easy to paint something into. My mind randomly went to, it would be funny to paint a normally very small creature as a large, oversized creature soaking in the lake. Not long after, "Ode to a Toad" was proudly displayed on the wall in my studio. And just like that, I had caught the upcycling vintage art bug!

What is upcycled vintage art?

Upcycled vintage art is taking unwanted art and giving it a second life. I like to paint elements of pop-culture into the art to give a modern relevance to out-of-vogue art styles. 

What is altered art? This is a new trend, and I've had fun meeting a few others who do the same as me... it's basically taking an existing work of art and altering it to tell a new story. My niche of altered art is that I like to alter the pieces subtly, as if the original artist had painted those elements in there themselves... kind of like fine-art-graffiti.

Why paint elements of pop-culture into vintage art? 

Throughout history artists have documented their culture, events, and history through their paintings. In our slice of time, much of our shared popular culture exist in a fictional and digital world (tv, movies, video games.) As an artist, I want to capture my experiences by creating a tangible works of art that give those fictional elements of our popular culture a place in art history.

By painting fictional elements into a physical work of art, it bridges that gap between the virtual world and the real world. As they say, seeing is believing... and being able to see an old painting with those fictional elements of our pop culture in them, allows us to imagine that they actually existed and were captured by the artist long ago.