A fresh #43Leaves art drop piece for Deptford X this coming weekend….

The latest #43Leaves piece is almost underway, the 43 pieces are painted, the weather last weekend put a dampener on the dropping of art, wind and rain is not good art dropping weather but this weekend is full of sunny promise and there are 43 leaves ready to go. 43 paintings on found unwanted #recycled material picked up off the street. Material picked up, cleaned up, painted on and now ready to be hung back out on the streets of Deptford for people to just take should they with to. The latest #43Leaves piece, another #43ArtDrop, once again, for a third and final time, is part of this year’s Deptford X art Festival – do Check out their website, there’s loads of outdoor art happening this week. The art drops will (mostly) happen over the weekend in the sunshine, keep an eye out from early Saturday morning on Deptford High Street, down by the river, the station and the surrounding area…

A #43Leaves painting ready for Deptford X (2021)

The hope once more is of course that people will engage with the 43 pieced piece, that they will engage with it, that they will take the pieces home, hang them on their walls, let them weather in their yards, balconies or gardens, let them hang in their halls, give them to their friends, and that people will use the hashtags and take photos of themselves with the pieces, take selfies, post then on their own social media along with the #43Leaves tag, that people will tell us where the pieces have gone for without engagement what is art? These old pieces of wood would have ended up in landfill or on bonfires, they mighty still, who knows? I like Deptford X I’ve taken part several times, there has been two art drop pieces in recent years, this will be a third and final one for 2021 while all the art at the festival this year is happening outside, we have quite a history, me and Deptford – The Atom Seed, those Cardiacs gigs and the Eifgr Day Itch at new Cress, adventures at the Deptford Freee Festival with our Organ hats on.

I haven’t counted properly but I suspect there has been something like 2500 paintings on unwanted material ledt hanging for people to take over the last ten years (and many befored that (way before someone claimed ot have invented Free Art Friday there was something called Free Art Thursday), there was the two year-long #365ArtDrop pieces of 2015 and 2018, the various #43Leaves pieces at precious Deptford X festivals, #43Leaves pieces at the Folkestone Triennial, there was one at the Leytonstone Arts Trail a couple of years ago, at the 2018 Bylines Festival out in a forest in Sussex, all over London, pieces left hanging in Hastings, Margate, Birmingham, Shrewbury, Manchester, Liverpool, art dropped for people to take all over the land and from the feedback and the photos people have posted, the paintings have made journeys all over the globe, I like the way people engage with these pieces

On we go in Dperford this coming weeken, watch my Instagram feed, watch this space.

Deptford X website

A flavour of previous pieces in Deptord at previous X festivals and such, do click on an image to enlarge or to run the slide show…