"Adaptive Reuse" - Everything but the kitchen sink

When I first began this painting, I had thought of calling it "Hot Mess #9" because I thought it was a hot mess:

I mean, what was I thinking?


But as Julia Cameron said in The Artist's Way, (paraphrasing here) sometimes your style has to break down so that you can make the transition to a new style. And sometimes you have to do some really ugly work before you can create something beautiful. And sometimes you just need to take your ugly painting, stick it in a corner for a year or so, and come back to it. So that's what I did.

Soon I realized that the problem wasn't that the painting had too much going on. It actually didn't have enough going on. So I started adding some of the odds and ends I'd been saving.

And eventually, I realized that right title for this piece is not "Hot Mess #9," but "Adaptive Reuse," a term used in architecture to describe the process of repurposing old structures. In this case, both the trash used to create this piece and the piece itself were repurposed.