I led off this section titled Repair Shop with the opening to the book I’m working on right now. And the subsequent entries may or may not make it into the final edits, but are part of the process, regardless. Today, I wanted to show you a recent ‘fix.’ I’ve been thinking about all the small super amateur repairs or MacGyvering I’ve done over the last few years — I’ve hand sewn a favourite satchel, fixed a zipper, repaired a hole in a shirt. The latest thing I’ve repaired are two of the statues from my buddha garden. Today’s repair or fix is the painting of two dilapidated garden statues.

They’re not anything special, honestly. Knick-knacks picked up here and there, none of them worth very much. But I like the way they all look in the corner of my yard and they bring me joy which these days is not nothing. Two of them were getting quite weathered and battered — of course they were, as I leave them out in the winter because I love the way they look in the snow and through the seasons.

Should I paint them, trying to match the original colours, I wondered? That seemed a little…dull…..But I didn’t want to throw them out either.

One day, Rob was done his most recent painting and there was more than his usual leftover oil paint on his palette. He usually scrapes it off when he’s done as it’s dried too much and also won’t match the required palette for the next one. I claimed the paint for my own.

Wherever there was flaking, or chipping, or bits that had fallen off the statues, I scraped a little of the paint and smoothed it on a bit like icing a cake. There were parts that I affixed using the paint as a glue, just glopping it on. I didn’t even really pay that much attention to the colours, trusting that the leftover palette would cohere in some way aesthetically.

Are they a bit messy and ugly and gaudy? Maybe? But the cracks are covered up, the gouges, the chips.

Afterwords, Rob applied a matte varnish for me that he also had leftover in his samples. (Not something he uses these days).

I wasn’t repairing or rejuvenating these two garden ornaments to learn anything per se, but naturally one usually does have a take-away or two. Nothing profound, but more along the lines of, fixing stuff can be fun! It’s satisfying playing around with coloured mud. Repair can resemble play. Colour is also good for the soul. And repair need not be fancy or restore a thing to what it was before: it can be a new thing, a thing that might even make you smile. It’s also good to remember that often you can repair a thing using available materials, whatever materials you have at hand. Maybe the loveliest thing I noticed was that one of the biggest chips in my blue ceramic buddha head was in the shape of a heart — this became more apparent when I painted it pink. And then, it does happen to echo nicely the hearts of the bleeding hearts, which this year are abundant.

I do like a hands-on process to help me think through whatever I happen to be writing about, or just to escape into a process so that I can try and figure the rest of my decrepit little life out on the back burner of the brain :)

Thanks for reading and following along!

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Shawna

June 5, 2024