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Gum Art by Michel Delgado

Always unique and innovative, Senagalese artist Michel Delgado began talking about the black spots on the sidewalks around Key West in the summer of 2007. He was fascinated to learn that they were pieces of gum. Soon, he describes, that he could not go anywhere without seeing these black blobs and there were thousands of them everywhere, according to his count. Delgado rarely closes a door on something that intrigues or captures his imagination to that degree and the more he wandered the streets looking at the gum imprints and pressings the more he began to explore the history, use and medium of sun-dried gum. Ultimately, there were narratives in what he saw: gum that had been annoyingly scraped across the cement after someone accidentally stepped into it, along with all the frustration and chaos that comes out of what he readily admits is something he finds funny. Delgado's process is detailed, beginning with stalking the gum on the sidewalks of Key West that capture his attention. He photographs them, turns them into a transparency to make a silk screen film and then inks each image only once onto watercolor paper. The paintings that emerge when he puts his brush to the paper are as he says like something from another world. The most difficult challenge to date is that the artist uses black very freely in all his paintings but in this body of work the only black that exists is from the original gum imprint itself.