Personal Documentation.

Painting A White Wall White

What is considered a 'waste of time'? At what point do we stop the mundane and evoke the chaos within?

By taking a small paintbrush and a large bucket of white house paint to paint an already white wall white, I attempted to illustrate the painstaking precision we put into the everyday, the events in our lives that occur on the regular and we allow for them to. I want to challenge the viewer to stay with me and watch white paint dry to the exact colour it’s being painted on. I intended to slowly build a sense of urgency as the realization that this monotonous act was going to take quite a while and they may not have the time to invest in such process.

An interesting observation I made after everyone had gone and I was left to finish the piece in solitude was the paintbrush actually wore away, this excited me because I realized the paintbrush became a symbol of spirit and how the continuous process was wearing it down. The final foot of the wall had to be completed via finger painting because the brush finally disappeared. The entire process took approximately four hours. I’d like to try this piece on a larger wall again using a small brush and painting with the same colours- I think the questions that one begins to ask themselves when participating in this performance are important ones that cannot always be asked of someone else, but must be called upon from the self.