My way of working with watercolour can be a wasteful way of going about things. I paint at the speed of light and for every success there are scores of paintings that fail, albeit by a hair's breadth. I am reluctant to throw away these perceived failures as they each bear witness to the struggle of getting it right. But eventually, the scores mount up to the hundreds and sooner or later some must go.
My experiments in paper making enable me to recycle. All of my natural ingredients (banana, sugar cane, etc,) benefit from the addition of fine watercolour paper reduced to pulp.
Today, as I was tearing up a stack of discarded paintings in readiness for recycling, I found myself subconsciously tearing away the worst bits first. What I was left with were successful fragments shown here against a background of handmade paper that earlier failures had helped to create.
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