Week 2 – Studio Challenge – your art materials

This week we’ll focus on raw materials and tools.

Art supplies!  

The phrase can send shivers down our spines and give us goosebumps.  Who doesn’t love to get new materials? It can be stimulating when you’re in a slump. It can feel like a win to get a lot of something you need on sale. Stockpiling makes us feel rich.

But what about those frames you ordered and never used? Will you? Unless it’s something you’ll use in a relatively short time it can become clutter. So much of cleaning is about eliminating the clutter of unused or un-needed items.

Five reasons we have clutter in our studios and our lives

1. Clutter can arise from a lack of time perception. When I was helping my parents downsize, my 88-year-old Mom had materials for enough projects to last her another 40 years. As she aged, she had no stamina to do her crafts but still had the desire. Much of her future-storing came out of a lack of time-sense, of not being aware of how long things take or of how little time she had left.  We must make choices. Because we don’t have an awareness that life is short, and because we have gluttonous appetites for creativity, we are often unwilling to choose and focus.
2. Clutter and future-storing (aka hoarding) can also come from a privation mindset, from thinking we need to save things because we may not have access to them in the future. It’s born of scarcity thinking and not an abundance mindset. Mom’s fabric storage also came from a bargain mentality that drove her to buy those fire sale fabrics almost 50 years before, when she wasn’t even sure how she’d use them. Double-knit. Ugh.
3. An attachment to our vision of ourselves can cause clutter. We are unwilling to let go of the attached vision or dream of who we wanted to become, of who we might have been. Instead, we became who we are now. We need to move on.
4. Sentiment drives us to keep things we don’t need. It reminds us of something or someone or it was a gift.
5. We don’t want to waste things. Even if we don’t need it, we are reluctant to get rid of it because we don’t want it to go to waste.  Aside from donating to thrift shops and fundraisers, there is a wonderful online resource for this called Freecycle that’s available worldwide.  It’s a group for listing things you no longer need or want that others might benefit from. It also keeps things out of landfills. If there’s not a chapter in your area, perhaps you can start one.

 

Marie Kondo in her book – The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, talks about keeping only those things you love, things that bring you joy. For art materials, that may mean love it or leave it. Her method is very effective as we move into cleaning and decluttering materials and tools.

This might include paint colors we no longer use, substrates that don’t work for us, torn or faded paper, those pastels you bought and never used, It could consist of tools that are broken or missing parts (like the staple gun my husband bought me that I kept for 5 years after it broke!). Supplies for projects you were once engaged with but haven’t touched in more than a year or suspect you won’t get back to.

Obviously, we all have materials that we need for creating work and might sometimes stockpile. Like reference materials for making collages, a pile of painting panels, etc. The trick is what is enough and how do we find them when we need them?

 

THIS WEEK’S ACTIONS:

1. Gather like items and sort one category at a time. For example, sort all your paints, first. Once that’s done, do all the brushes, and so on.
2. Take everything out of its usual place, and hold it and ask questions like: When and why did you get it? When did you last use it? What emotional attachments do you have to it? Is it broken or does it have missing parts? Are you keeping it because it was expensive even though you don’t use or need it? 
3. Apply the 20/20 rule. Is it something you can easily replace it in 20 minutes for under $20? If so, perhaps space is more valuable.
4. Sort things into three piles, then clean and store 

• Donate: My rule is: What goes in the donate box never comes back out. Schools and thrift shops can benefit. Store the box in your car trunk until you donate it and don’t look in that box again. Ever.
• Keep: Store the things you use as you decide to keep them. If something doesn’t have a home, after other things are sorted work on where these items will live. Keep like-materials together for easy storage.
• Maybe: Set it aside. If you don’t use it this week, ditch it.  (Barb Mowrey calls this the “Purgatory” box. I love that term!) If you have materials you still want to use but haven’t yet, set a realistic deadline to begin using them. Then have fun.
• Clean: If anything needs cleaning or special protection for storage, do it now. Maybe you need to put carpet on the shelves of your painting rack like I do, so the frames won’t get scuffed.
• Store: Now, find a home for everything. If it doesn’t have a home, it’s an orphan, a street child. It will keep knocking around and creating doubt, uncertainty, longing, and clutter. Better to ditch it. We’ll talk more about storage in week 4.

Some special considerations

Textiles, collage, journaling, scrapbooking, bookmaking, etc.

• Does it still suit my aesthetic, or have I moved beyond this style?
• Consider making a clippings file vs keeping the magazines.
• How can I categorize my fabrics, patterns or reference photos so that I can easily find what I need? Use a classification method and labels. This article on using a Controlled Vocabulary is a good place to start. (Skip down to the sub-heading, Controlled Vocabularies). Your system might be much simpler but this could give you ideas on how to organize print and scrap files. 
• Ask yourself, if I need to find this where would I look?
• Consider file folders or clear storage to see what you’ve got, with labels for categories.

Office, stationary, business files, packing supplies

These need their own place to live. I have a separate office for administrative stuff so that I won’t get depressed or tempted to work on something due to its presence in the studio. I keep packing materials in my bedroom closet because that’s where I have space to store the bubble wrap.

Unfinished projects

If you have unfinished projects, devise a system of keeping it together. For projects with a lot of moving parts, like collage, sewing, art book-making, etc. putting all the components in one storage box is great. You might also have a drawer or shelf for in-progress work such as paintings on a designated spot in your painting racks.

In the book, The Creative Habit, by Twyla Tharp, she talks about gathering all the materials for a project during the research phase and uses this box method to keep her ideas and materials together. When the project is done she has a complete record of it in the box which goes into her storage.

 

Conversation…

What are some of your challenges in sorting through and cleaning up art materials? Comment over on the Studio Heaven Facebook page.

If you haven’t yet joined the challenge, it’s not too late to join in. You can join the conversation here.