Left & Found

Left & Found I and II, Liguria, Italy 2013

I started a new project this weekend, excited by the possibilities and driven by the need to just get my work out there. So often I think we pull back from sharing our work for fear of the cost, fear of a loss of control, fear of theft, fear of rejection and God knows what else. And so it sits on hard-drives, sits on shelves. I want mine out there, and last year at one of our Vancouver Gatherings someone asked me for some ideas on sharing and I threw this one out: print your work and leave it somewhere. A random act of guerilla-style spreading of beauty. If what you really want is just to share it, why not?

And then the idea kept poking at me until I was sitting at Milano, the coffee shop in my new neighborhood in Vancouver’s Gastown, reading a book about ideas and creativity and out of nowhere it came back, this time with a name: Left & Found. So every month I’m printing between 20 and 40 prints in an on-going limited edition series. All about 8×5, they’re printed on fine art paper, hand-signed and numbered, and I’ve written a small URL on the back so people can find more information about the Left &Found project. The first ones get placed this week. In a year I’ll have put almost 400 prints out there, left on coffee shop tables, counters, in restaurants and shops – to be found, enjoyed, overlooked, torn, bent, collected, adored, misunderstood, or whatever else happens to our art when we release it into the world to take on a life we could never have foreseen.

It’s not much, but the more I do this the more sure I am that the question, “How can I make money at this?” isn’t remotely as interesting as a simpler question: how can I create work I love and share that work in new ways?