When I’m not designing something for one of my clients I am often found in my garage composing abstract graphic paintings out of what ever I can find. They’re basically collections of various items like plywood, metal scraps, computer parts, wires, bolts, or anything I can find that no longer seems useful. The sad thing is that I often don’t need to look any further than my own home or office to find an abundance of material. It’s almost inconceivable to me how much waste our culture manages to generate.

To me, these paintings are about who we are, right now. These are the artifacts we leave behind for other civilizations to dig up and try to figure out who we were and how we lived. At the very least these paintings are an excuse to preserve some very ordinary things of modern society and to recycle some junk that would otherwise end up in a landfill or incinerated into the Earth’s atmosphere.

The process of transforming undesirable items into desirable ones is very exciting to me and recycling waste as design or art just makes sense. I like the idea that art can come from almost anything. Even garbage.

Chris Noel