Another #43Leaves piece left hanging on a wall today, the first more formal art drop piece of the year and the first since the 43 that were left in Bristol over the Upfest weekend last year (or did I do one later in the Sumer in London last year?). The first of 43 pieces that will make up a month-long April #43Leaves drop was left today in the late afternoon Spring sunshine over in Hackney Wick, it will go on throughout the month. Once again 43 paintings, 43 leaves on found unwanted material picked up off the street. The fact that it is unwanted recycled material has always been a very important part of these art drops. It has to be material that was heading for landfill, something that was considered not worth anything by anyone. Unwanted material picked up, cleaned up, recycled, painted on and then left hanging back out there on the street for someone to just take should they wish to. Hopefully whoever takes it will make use of the hashtag on the back of the piece and tell us, maybe post a photo of themselves with the painting, people getting involved is another important part of these #43leaves pieces, it is about engagement.  

.

There have been at least a  couple of thousand art drop pieces now, I started calling them #43Leaves pieces sometime ago, before that there was the the 365piece art drop that took up a year in 2015 (and another year long piece in 2018) and in the years before the two year long pieces there were lots and lots of art drops. Someone asked me the other day where and when did my art drop habit start? I can’t honestly remember now, there was the Free Art Friday thing about ten or so years ago of course, there were art drops way before that though (there was life before the internet you know!). The first time I heard of anything called Free Art Friday, actually it was originally a Thursday thing, I remember Free Art Thursdays happening in the North of England way back in in the last century, they publicised via photocopied info sheets, word of mouth and the Free Information Network newsletters (or F.I.N Cells) that were vital back in the day. I first dropped art, we probably didn’t call them art drops back then, in my teenage North Wales days, it was probably in Liverpool that I first left a piece (the Liverpool art scene and the North Wales art scene were kind of one thing, Liverpool or Manchester was where most bands, musicians and artists from North Wales made for).  The art drop thing was happening in London in the 90’s, once again they weren’t really called art drops and  there was no internet and no one had cameras, whole loads of things happened without anyone pointing a phone at them back there. I do remember finding some online documentation of a Free Art Thursday in Stoke in 90’s, there is no record besides a dubious photo or two of the art drops myself and a number of others were doing way before anyone called them art drops.  Actually I do recall being rather annoyed with one London art critic accusing me of ripping off Adam Neate when she picked up on one of the Hundred Piece art drop pieces I did over a weekend at one of the Hackney WickEd weekends somewhere around 2011 – as far as I know Adam Neate never worked with recycled material and that aspect was not a part of what he was doing, and he certainly wasn’t the first to leave art on the street although he probably was the first to make more of a noise about it when he did, it was a time when artists were starting to wise up in terms of self-publicity. I like Adam Neate’s art, I don’t see that he’s ever influenced me though and I’ve certainly never ripped him off. There was that other bloke who claimed he’d invented the whole Free Art Friday thing and good on him, we worked with My Dog Sighs quite a bit in both his and Cultivate’s early days, that was quite a few years on from the first Free Art Thursday things though and people had been leaving art on the street for other people to take for years before his thing (they just didn’t put up social media pages and shout about it, well it wasn’t really an option back there). I do remember there  was some great free art left during the East London road protest years by various people, some of it documented in copies of Organ from the time. I can’t remember when I first intentionally left a piece of art for someone to take, it was certainly in the last century and I do know there’s probably been well over two thousand pieces since that first one was left, probably closer to three thousand now by now. 

I like doing it, I like these art drops, these #43Leaves pieces, I Like that I don’t need anyone’s permission, that I don’t need a gallery, that there’s no money involved, that people engage with the pieces, I love the photos people post, the stories they tell me. I really like that a small collection of the pieces now hanging in the office at London Fields Railway Station (someone spied them hanging there recently and told me about them), I like that there’s a restaurant toilet in East London that has a few, i like that they’ve gone off all over the world, I like that I can just leave leaves without all the annoyance that art galleries and curators bring, without all the bulshit to put it frankly.. 

.