He also took up embroidery on pudding cloths and lengths of deckchair canvas, using the skeleton of an old deckchair as an embroidery frame.
Local artists use the city as their canvas and street artists from around the world come to create intricate works on the buildings of Cerro Alegre.
I should have known not to listen to him when he arrived at rehearsals with his own canvas chair.
"As the ambition of Katie's storytelling has expanded, we've needed to expand the canvas," says Leo Warner, the video director who has worked with Mitchell since 2007.
What if it was a blank canvas for a work of art?
"Unlike Sinn Féin, they can draw on a broad canvas of pro-agreement supporters as well as the traditional nationalist vote.
JMW Turner stabs and spits at his canvas.
The painting was remarkable too in the degree to which it was painted out of doors: Brown rigged up a trolley and wheeled the canvas every day into position.
It looks like any other hospital trolley, except it's covered in green canvas so nobody can see the person underneath.
The first thing I did when I got money was buy better canvas and better-quality paint, because I knew you needed it and I can look at those pictures from 50 years ago and they are still OK.
Instead of taking inspiration from the catwalk, the company's menswear and womenswear designers work together and "start every season with a blank canvas", according to Cos head of womenswear Karin Gustafsson, and take cues from architecture, art, photography and music.
