It is that, but there is a deeper, more nefarious, piece to this puzzle. Stu(ruins)art is more about taking people’s hard-fought work and twisting them into new stories for no other reason than their previous owners discarded what they no longer cared to hang upon their walls. These un-loved relics become my canvases. To me, this form of graffiti is more of an artistic movement than the paint being painted onto them.
When I first jumped into the ‘Monster into thrift store painting’ genre, I wanted my own hook to set the work apart if ever so slightly. At the time, my grandson was having nightmares, and my friend, a psychiatric nurse, asked ‘If he knew the offer the monster some ice cream trick?’ That stuck, and now when you see a Stu(ruins)art piece there will, almost always, be a small bear with a striped shirt handing the beast in the painting an ice cream cone, presumably to deescalate the situation.
