Combining standard art supplies with materials purchased from box retail home improvement stores helps me to rethink traditional approaches to painting.

There is nothing I like more than going to my local home improvement store to buy art supplies. I have this long-standing fantasy that I am locked into one of these giant stores for a month with nothing to do but tinker with all of the amazing items stacked on the skyscraper-like shelves. With all of my thoughts about the crabgrass frontiers of sub-ex-urbia, the home improvement store with its fragmentary displays of the very elements which comprise our landscape is the perfect place for me to gather what I need to work.

One product that I always pick up on these visits is Gorilla Glue. Gorilla Glue is a pure polyurethane adhesive that pours out of the bottle with the color of a low-grade maple syrup and the consistency of molasses. It is billed as an industrial strength glue that can bond almost anything together, maybe what Super Glue was for a slightly older generation. I have no idea how well the product works for its stated application, though I did use it to repair one of my shoes recently, which seemed to work just fine.

One of the things that makes Gorilla Glue highly usable in artwork is that you can mix it with regular acrylic paints to get different colors. The glue by itself dries to a yellowy buff, so that is something to consider when mixing. Once dry, the surface can be painted over if there needs to be adjustment.

The most spectacular aspect of Gorilla Glue, however, is that it expands into an intestine-like topography as it dries. For anyone who enjoyed puff paint as a child, Gorilla Glue should be a welcome addition to the arsenal. The glue can also be tapped and mashed with an object while it is wet to produce different textures and effects. As it dries, the substance takes on a stringy consistency that can be dripped like an acrylic tar gel, though not with the same fluidity. I use disposable palette knives, plastic cutlery, and the ends of old paint brushes to manipulate the material because it would ruin my better tools.

Many of my works deal with imagined cartographies, so I am able to use the glue to create various kinds of relief. I also like working with the adhesive because there is an element of the unexpected. Over the years, I have become adept at controlling how the glue will dry, but there is always something surprising about the final outcome.

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