Collaborating Alone

About a year ago, a good friend of mine was getting rid of his deceased uncle's possessions.  He was an artist.  "Come check out his paintings & frames," he said.  "You can re-use the canvases - we have hundreds."  So off I went to rummage through a huge collection of landscapes and portraits by Ray Ronyak.  Most of the portraits were of family members and you won't be able to find him on Google.  It was a strange experience thinking about the immortality of art - whether the artist is remembered or not.  And here are hundreds of high quality pieces, that took a person a huge amount of time to execute, piled in a basement, ready to be picked over by vultures like me.  

Unable to completely blanch the canvas and erase Ray's print on this world (only the artist can do that to their own pieces!), I've been hanging onto these pieces - trying to come up with an idea of what to do with them.  I finally decided to just start playing around.  Sometimes I've found that the physical act of applying paint to a canvas will spark inspiration.  So...I took a chance on that thought...

Ronyak's original piece

Current state!

My first instinct was reaching for Gray's Anatomy and seeing what creepy shit I could come up with...then I looked at my inspiration wall collage for more interactive figurative poses...and the above is what I have so far!  I truly have no idea what direction I'm going in or what the end product will be, which is a very different experience for me.  Usually everything is so planned out from beginning to end.  Here's hoping that a little spontaneity and a lot of layers will create something wonderful!