In 2012 Rose Miller put her successful career on hold to raise her beloved children. Finding she needed to continue her creative outlet, she launched The Wolfgang and Rose Project in October 2013, for which Rose tries to paint at least one artwork every few weeks to keep her creative sanity. Rose and her Poodle “Muse” Wolfgang, paint glamorous and chic works of art inspired by fashion, interior design and pop culture.
Before we reveal the Re:make artists we thought we’d present snippets of a few more of the artworks we’ve found over the past year.
Once you start looking for something, it appears more often than you’d expect. So it would be quite common for us to be walking along and see a scene like this one:
Whereas once upon a time we would have kept walking, now we have become pavement discard connoisseurs. Here are a few more of our finds.
Some kind of dark magic on this small canvas.
We found plenty of artworks with Pollock-esque splatters.
Mystery characters of the street…
Now to the next stage of the Re:make journey: meeting our artists. We’ll be profiling our artists and revealing the artworks they are transforming throughout January.
It’s tough times for the music industry – people are leaving songs on the street. This handpainted cover version of “This Must Be the Place” by Talking Heads, for example. It’s a song that has been widely covered, even inspired a movie – how might a Re:make artist interpret it?
Sunrise or sunset? The impressionist cousin of Summer Holiday, this painting was languishing on the streets of Marrickville until we picked it up and added it to the Re:make collection. It must have used a lot of yellow paint – like staring into the real sun (which of course one should never do) it is almost too bright. Which of our Re:make artists will be flying close to the sun? We’ll let you know soon.
Most of the Re:make artworks are paintings, but there has been the occasional object that has piqued our interest as we’ve kept an eye on the roadside. There was competition for this one – other people nearby had noticed it too and were eyeing it off, but our scavenging skills proved to be the strongest.
It’s surely having the more interesting life with us. Once a printer’s drawer full of letterpress type, over the next few months it is going to be transformed by a Re:make artist.
A large canvas with a small hole in it – still wrapped in plastic – we first thought to be ruined and discarded, not an artwork at all and merely an abandoned canvas. But when we visited the Yoko Ono exhibition at the MCA, War is Over! (if you want it), we realised that in fact this artwork is a version of one of Ono’s instruction paintings:
This is the solemn face of the unloved portrait, left out on an inner west street to an unknown fate. This mysterious face has a number of siblings, other portraits of various characters with similarly grave expressions. We can’t promise that they’ll cheer up in the process of being remade, but they will certainly go on to a much more interesting fate than what they might have expected.
Two rolled up pieces of canvas leaning up against a brick wall in Dulwich Hill could have anything on them. Unrolling them revealed two slightly different paintings of the same nude woman. In both her face is obscured, so the chances of us recognising the model at the local shops are low. Both paintings were abandoned when almost finished, and our anonymous nude exists in an art limbo, waiting for the final brushstrokes she feared might never come.
Another enigmatic work, this small canvas has been mostly painted over white, leaving only peepholes to the floral scene underneath. What lies beneath the thick white brushstrokes? Only the original artist knows, but it’s fun to try and guess. It’s a painting that already has two lives; Re:make is here to give it another.
Most of the artworks we’ve found for Re:make have been left out on the street next to bins or in piles of discards for council collection, but this one was left outside a pharmacy in Dulwich Hill. At first Vanessa wasn’t sure if it was actually discarded or someone had just put it there while they filled their prescription inside, but she went and did her shopping and it was still there when she came back, so it joined the motley collection that is the Re:make family.
Geometric abstraction is an unusual subject for a tapestry, and we can’t help but wonder what led to it being discarded outside a pharmacy. Although here at Re:make, we like a mystery.
The unusual thing about “Both Sides Now” is that both sides of the canvas are painted. On one side are three, nude pale human figures floating through an abstract pool of navy blue, and on the other (from which this sneak peek comes) are two brown, nude human figures contorted across a bright red and green background. It’s tempting to regard this as a heaven/hell type of statement, but neither situation seems particularly appealing.
Found on the streets of Bondi, perhaps it was discarded because there was no more space left to paint and the artist moved on to a fresh canvas…
Found in Marrickville, far from the beach, we guess that the artist was yearning for a glimpse of the ocean so much they made their own.
Some of the artworks we’ve found we can’t work out if they were finished or abandoned halfway – Summer Holiday is one of these. It’s a simple scene: sand, water, sky. It’s a bit like a stage set, preparing for the entrance of a sea monster or a surfacing submarine or some kind of drama, which makes it a perfect candidate for remaking.