Old Man of the Sea Painting

I first started experimenting with plastic at my art foundation course at North Warwickshire college in 1995. Unfortunately the only colour I had then was black. I carried on at Liverpool Art school using the plastic as a canvas and adding colour with acrylics. Moving to Berlin in 2000 broadened my palette out somewhat as the Germans have a much better recycling attitude and bins had colour co-ordinated sections. As I type this I have found polyethylene in loads of new colours. This year I had a studio in Barcelona for a couple of months and I changed my working practice. Instead of working with virgin plastic that I have collected over many years, I started to collect the plastic off the streets, recycling it into pictures. This new aspect of my work adds another dimension to my practice. The planet has a massive problem with plastic waste and re-using found material in this way is a definite solution.. (albeit a small one.) In the future I would like to travel to other big cities, collecting and using the plastic I find there, and then exhibiting them. Here are two links to recent articles in major Plastics Industry Blogs: http://goo.gl/e5MPBR http://goo.gl/VwlTSl