Sometimes I’m lucky enough to acquire beautiful old bits of timer from my husbands’ building sites. These have often served as weatherboards, flooring, or in the latest case stair risers. I love painting on recycled timber. There is something very satisfying about re-purposing such a beautiful material and the synergy of painting organic images on an organic material is really appealing.
The size of the timber impacts how big the finished painting can be, which is a lovely constraint and means that each batch of timber I recycle produces a unique body of work.
Here’s a little run down on how these are made….
Original stair riser
The stair risers are cut in a circle using a router, I have a little help with this part! We look to maximise the size of the circle to use as much of the timber as possible.
Router
Cut timer disc
Once this is complete, I use a belt sander to take off all the polyurethane on the face of the disc and smooth out the raw edges. Then the circles are taped to protect the edges from new paint and prepared with two coats of gesso ready for painting.
I love that you can see the previous life this timber has had by the edges, all the little imperfections is what makes them so beautiful.
‘Glory’ 250mm round, Acrylic on Recycled Timber Disc, available in my shop.