Introduction: Make Art With Trash

About: An SFSU alumni fine arts major, seeking for something that doesn't pressure me to get a passing grade.
People throw trash all the time. Some of it is degradable for a couple of years, others will take hundreds. It's sort of a sad thing that when we think of garbage, we think of unsanitary, filthy, and not thought of as something of worth to keep. How some art is not considered trash is because of our cultural perceptions: art is that of a canvas with paint that pictures a figurative landscape or person, it's not art when your garbage can starts to become full.

The reason may be because of the message and medium we're sending and using. If we need to throw out stuff to get other stuff to confine our space, it's garbage. It we buy a painting from a famous artist and hang it on a wall, it's considered a work of art.

All you need is a drawing implement; it can be a pencil, marker, or crayons (I found a pair of crayons in a outdoor restaurant) and a piece of trash that is legible for the particular material being marked on. Markers on plastic wrap would probably do, but I'm using the crayons and a white paper bag, which I found in an outdoor restaurant in San Francisco.

Step 1: What You'll Need:

-A piece of trash
-Drawing implement
-A simple tessellation pattern, or whatever you like to draw (I prefer tessellations for the purpose of utilizing all space)

So here is piece trash that I'm using:

It seems like something too easy to work as your drawing canvas, but this is actual trash that was left on a table at an outdoor restaurant in San Francisco. One of my friends left it there after she finished her bag of cookies, so I just grabbed it after finding a pair of crayons, both orange and red and started making a square pattern onto the bag.

Currently, the back side is finished, but in the next step, you'll see a completed drawing:

Step 2: Finished! Now Let's Contemplate. . .

And you're done!

Now that you've drew on the piece of trash, consider this: the medium you used was a piece of trash, but now what you've done was make a work of art with it. Will "garbage" be synonymous to "art" when you look at it? Was I lucky to even find something very flexible to be used as a drawing canvas?

And if I were to throw it in the garbage if it is a work of art, have I destroyed a piece of culture? Or is this just ridiculous to even think about?

Well the one thing I can be assured is that the work is just art, my drawing was an action of bringing awareness to how we might think about garbage/trash/whatever you call it and art.