Making "A Fresh Coat of Paint"

The Heritage Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador placed a call for artists to participate in their October 2017 four day conference. Because of my interest in architecture and its life in our province, I thought this might be a perfect fit. The theme of the conference was "Adapting Heritage" so I submitted a series of paper collages offering a new perspective on heritage structures. I proposed to use paint chips from their historic colour palette as my paper and photos from their Heritage Structure Search website as my subject matter.

When my project was selected, I was excited to start exploring the gorgeous colours in the "Historic Colours of Newfoundland" palette, only to be stopped in my tracks when I discovered these paint colours (and most importantly for me, their paper paint chips) are no longer being made. I quickly decided to continue the project with an adapted approach - making the "paint chips" by hand. I was able to get the colour palette matched and started rolling out the paint. To apply the colour names to the paint chips, which in this case were charming, unique, and vital to the project, I used wintergreen oil to transfer the ink by hand as well.

The works on display in the Heritage Foundation of NL board room

I also decided to incorporate images of the heritage structures into the collages, allowing the works to give glimpses of the real constructions behind my abstracted structures. I absolutely loved the process of sifting through the large collection of images to find the structures that appealed to me, and this series is only the start of this exciting project. I'm sure I'll return to this subject again and again, and this colour palette has become the backbone of my entire body of work.