Turning Milk Cartons Into Paintings
Looking from the outside, you would never expect to find the riot of colour with which artist Micheline Montgomery has decorated her modest Mississauga home.
Inside is a palette inspired by a stay some years ago in Mexico. She has intense blue on a kitchen wall; sunny gold walls in the dining and living rooms, which she uses as her studio; vibrant primary colored cushions on a wood settee, and table surfaces, where she works, layered with bright paint.
“My grandkids now realize it’s an artist’s floor,” says Montgomery, a mother of three and grandmother of five, of the spattered oak strips in her living room.
The red gravel parking space in front of the house, which allows water to sink into the ground, hints of another colour that informs her life and work: green. She calls herself a green conscious artist.
Her paints and glues are environmentally friendly. She recycles all the bits and pieces she can as materials for her paintings, collages, handmade journals, bookmarks and cards. She even uses the paper from milk and juice cartons. Once liberated from the polyethylene film coating, this paper is bright, white and looks hand-made.
This is what caught my attention when I first met Montgomery at Word on the Street, Toronto’s giant outdoor book fest. at a shared booth, she was fashioning little notepads from corrugated cardboard and recycled paper. She explained where the heavy paper she used for her paintings came from.
How difficult is it to remove the plastic film? It helps if you have a good set of fingernails, making it easier to separate the layers and start the process. Montgomery and I sat in her kitchen, delaminating some Tropicana juice cartons. Once you start lifting the plastic, peeling it back in one sheet while holding the paper beneath down carefully with your other hand, you’ll find it’s finicky, but not too difficult.
One can see why this high-quality paper would be a useful source of recycled fibre on an industrial level. Polycoat cartons and Tetra Paks collected in Toronto’s blue box program are sent off to South Korea where paper mills are equipped to handle the post-consumer waste, stripping away the plastic in the pulping process.
Montgomery uses lots of other recycled and found materials: corrugated cardboard donated by a coffee shop, brown wrapping paper, old books, newspapers and journals, used fridge magnets, even the backs of envelopes.
Her images of choice are faces, mainly of women, sometimes heavily layered with paint, other times, lightly executed.
Montgomery describes her life as a process of unmasking, layer after layer, like the proverbial onion. Learning about her past, is a similar experience. She has worked as a psychiatric nurse at Sick Kids and the Queen Street Mental Health Centre; she earned an M.a. in psychology from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, followed by a PhD in philosophy.
Many of the faces she creates are nurses, a subject she plans to explore artistically.
“A nurse is a soul worker,” she says of her former profession. “When you’re born and when you die, a nurse is there.”
Find her at pearangelart.com.
<a href="http://www.waste-management-world.com/index/from-the-wires/wire-news-display/1521093436.htmltag:news.google.com,2005:cluster=http://www.waste-management-world.com/index/from-the-wires/wire-news-display/1521093436.htmlSat, 15 Oct 2011 10:50:28 GMT”>Turning milk cartons into paintings
