Category: State of the Studio

Almost every artist I know has a stash of unsold artwork. I’ve been thinking a lot about mine as I run into it at every turn in my Studio Makeover Challenge.

Where to put it all?

I can be pretty prolific when I get going in the studio. Even while I was working full time on my business VisualsSpeak, I discovered I had done over 400 drawings and paintings. I’ve got stuff stashed all over. Framed work is in the hallway. Matted work stacked on shelves. Other work in piles, boxes and drawers. I have found places to put it, some of them even have space left to stack more.

Am I asking the right question?

I wonder if I should be asking what can I do with all this unsold work?

I do run studio sales periodically, but even if it is successful, I have WAY too much work to sell all at the same time. And then there is the older work. Still great stuff, but it doesn’t always show well with the current work. Not to mention all the drawings. Hundreds of them. I don’t want to frame them all up because then the storage problem gets way more complicated and space requirements grow. It all feels like a delicate balance.

It feels insane to have so much art sitting in artists studios in a world that needs more art.

Brainstorming solutions

I want to hear any and all ideas about what you do or might do with all the work that accumulates. Here my starting list:

• Burn it all and feel the freedom of release from the past
• give it away, maybe five free artworks a week for the price of postage
• have a super sale
• have a make a donation area on site for particular pieces
• use it to make money for a cause
• offer it for barter
• incorporate it somehow into new work
• glue it all together and carve into it
• chop it up and make collages
• chop it up for cards

What else?

Really, I need more ideas.

 Update: I’ve also been getting great ideas on Facebook. I’m adding them here to keep track of them and to share with others.

• Kim Thayer: Donate them to various non-profits to hang in their headquarters. Make sure you have a card or something saying, “Generously donated by Xxxx” or something along those lines. Or give them out as presents to the professionals in your life: dentist, doctor, lawyer, etc. Chances are, they will hang it in their offices and their other clients/patients will see it and inquire. Free publicity
• Janet Chance Cooper: Donate to non profit organizations
• Tobi Kibel Piatek: Any ideas. Please share. I have a similar problem.
• Tim Mammel: Take photos! Then maybe put the work on an online gallery. Then store the work away in a safe place while remembering what you have.
• Helen Cox: several sales through the year; competitions; give aways; non profit prizes/gifts for their raffles and fundraisers…
• Deborah Thomas: Repurpose. Create things with them.
• Julie Stuart: I’ve been offering mine up for sale…priced very cheap and even free. I want to see it fly off into as many welcome arms as it can. It’s a one-time clearing with a limited time frame.
• Deborah Thomas: I used to buy wallets that an artist made out of W magazine pages and clear vinyl – and an interesting button. I got comments on it everytime I pulled it out! I can imagine cool things like that.

Work continues on the Create an Ideal Studio in 30 Days: A Studio Makeover Challenge. This week I’m working on figuring out better ways to hang work on the walls when it is in process. I have tried a lot of things in the past, but never really found something that I’m happy with. It’s certainly easier when I am willing to put tons of holes in the walls, but given my current studio is a room in my house I’d prefer not to totally trash the walls.

Use the Whiteboard

I have a whiteboard in my office which is next to my studio. I may have known at one point, but had forgotten that it is magnetic. So all I needed to do was get some decent small magnets and I’d have instant hanging space. I got packages of little bar shapes which work well on the edges of the images. I just have to be careful with them because they can leave marks on the paper.

Gather Ideas for Studio Makeover

I asked a few other artists for suggestions, and Jim Carpenter suggested nailing wood strips to the wall. This way I could put as many nails and such on the strips and limit the holes in the wall.

I also visited Pinterest where I have to be careful not to be sucked into endless rabbit holes. I found some artists walls covered in pieces in progress, but not many with shots close up enough to see exactly how they were hanging things. I did find a picture of a grid in front of a wall, which I thought might be another version of strips on the wall.

Engineering Assistance

I’m married to an engineer. For those of you who aren’t, the main thing this means is everything gets taken apart and analyzed (most but not all get put back together.) Nothing is OK the way it is, everything can be improved. Endlessly. Sometimes this can be useful, and I took a risk that my hanging system could benefit from more ideas.

Off to Home Depot for my Studio Makeover

Mark, my personal engineer, decided we needed to go look at everything the home improvement store has before deciding what we should use on the walls. We looked at every molding in the place, and decided to try this lightweight inexpensive eight foot plastic strip. It’s technically for installing tile. He also got a box of nails and  grommets so the nails would stick out enough to get the strips back off the wall if needed.

Best Hanging System Ever

So far, I am loving this system. It was inexpensive and easy to install.

I can use every strip to hang smaller works, and every other strip to hang 20″ x 30″ work. It’s super flexible since I can easily move the binder clips. I am going to install it on the opposite wall too.

Challenges of the system

What I’ve found so far is the binder clips do make marks on the walls if I’m not careful. It doesn’t damage it, but marks the paint. I can live with it. If the paper isn’t flat, as you can see in the smaller work above, this doesn’t help flatten it, it allows it to curl more. I’m experimenting with adding clips on the bottom to help. It’s not a huge problem since the main reason for doing this is to see the work as it progresses.

I want to work on panel. When we installed this, we nailed into studs so it would be as strong as possible. In theory, my personal engineer is planning on creating some kind of custom clip thing that will allow me to hang deep panels. He’s still analyzing. We shall see if it is strong enough.

Work continues on the Studio Makeover Challenge.

I think the work for the Art of Personal Story show will be done in oil on panels. I ordered a selection of sizes of panels to try, and the box has been sitting in the hall for months because I didn’t have anywhere to put them. The oil paint was in piles on my studio table. I have new mediums and cleaning fluids. Where will they live?

The studio is already full, so making space means getting clever. I’ve had to move things around and let others go. Finally I was able to clear a shelf as a start.

I want it to be easy to grab a panel when I am ready to work, so I spent some time covering the edges with blue painters tape so they’d be ready to paint. I loaded them onto the shelf by size, then covered them with newsprint to keep the dust and cat hair off.

Not gorgeous, but functional. I get overwhelmed and paralyzed if I try to do attractive and functional in the studio. I get reluctant to use things that will shift a careful arrangement. This way, there will be no danger of that.

I am addicted to organizing devices

Before I moved from Penland School of Craft to Oregon I had a yard sale. The day of the sale I looked outside and realized everything I had on the lawn was some kind of organizing device. Every kind imaginable. And it didn’t include all the ones I was bringing with me. I was letting them go because they never really lived up to my expectation for how they were going to revolutionize my life and unleash my inner Martha Stewart. They were supposed to somehow make me a neat and organized person but only left me dealing with the unending tide of stuff.

When I get overwhelmed with too much stuff, I roam the aisles of Storables, The Container Store, even Lowe’s or Home Depot in a pinch. I’m sure someday I will find the perfect solution to all the art and supplies in my studio. Of course, they will also come in awesome colors and be easy to maintain.

Using what I have to store supplies

This time I decided I would use things I have to test my latest organization idea before I invest in more potential solutions that are destined for the lawn of a yard sale. I have one big table space. I work in a range of media on different surfaces. I never have enough space, especially if I have the supplies for one media all over the table. I decided I need to have a way to easily move each media on and off the table. Individual boxes seemed to fit the bill. I have a number of different kinds, including a bunch of cardboard peach boxes that stack. They aren’t beautiful, but they will be good for seeing if I actually move the supplies around how I think I will. I also had a small rolling wire shelf cart. The boxes almost fit on it, so it’s the other part of my proof of concept. It fit underneath an old over toilet shelf that is light enough to move as needed. [threecol_one]

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The plastic box on the top shelf has oil mediums and brushes. The next shelf down is Gamblin Oil Colors, followed by Lucas 1862. The bottom is assorted gloves and tools I use with oil. I used other boxes on shelves for markers, watercolors, colored pencils, acrylics etc.

Thinking about the way things move in the studio

I’m hopeful about these changes because it is easier to move the media back and forth between the working table and storage shelves. I can also grab my markers and pencils and bring them into the living room to draw while we watch a movie.

I just have to be consistent about putting things away to make space for the next thing. This may be the system’s downfall. My tendency is to work on lots of different things at once.

Any suggestions?

What have you done in your studio, or seen other artists do to work with these challenges? I will say it was easier when I had a bigger studio space.

At the end of each year I spend time evaluating my studio space. This year I’d like to try doing it more regularly so it doesn’t get quite so overwhelming. I need to use my small space differently for my next body of work. My space is small, so even when it’s messy, there needs to be an underlying organization to keep any sense of control.

Create an Ideal Studio in 30 Days: A Studio Makeover Challenge

As I started my latest studio excavation, Jean Wilkey posted a challenge on her blog about reorganizing our studios. Since I’ve been shifting from working in watercolor to oil I need to make more space to work as well as for new supplies. I’m happy to find other artists working on this so I can get some new ideas. My goal will be an improved studio in 30 days, not sure ideal is possible given space limitations.

The current state

I don’t have photos of the very beginning of the process. Suffice it to say it was like this but with tons more stuff on the table. My creative process is messy,which gets reflected in my workspace. I’d also much rather paint than clean.

I’ll be posting updates as I progress.

I’ve been focused on trying to figure out how to use oil paint. Reading about it, watching videos. Intensely and narrowly focused on it. I’m working on 10 panels, experimenting with various aspects of how the paint reacts to mediums, palette knives and brushes. It’s been a dance between having fun and feeling frustrated because I don’t have control over the media yet.

Maybe control isn’t the best approach?

Putting work in progress up on this blog gives me an opportunity to step back and see what I’m doing. Last week I wrote about allowing myself to use brushes in addition to palette knives. I was so obsessed about figuring out the tools that I lost sight of the image.

I almost always paint bare trees. I’m more interested in the structure of the branches than leaves. I went to a familiar type of image thinking it would be easier than coming up with something new in addition to the new media.

I was so tightly focused on my battle with the tools that I stopped thinking about the image, and ended up with a bare tree in a lush sea of grass.  It’s not that my work is ever representationally accurate, but this just seemed wrong.

 This may be the best part of oil painting

I started by trying to darken the ground, but the whole thing just felt overworked. When I do that in watercolor, it goes in the trash. Here, I can just scrape it back and redo.

Here is the painting now. Not sure if it it finished yet, but that’s a topic for another post.

Watercolor

I make color charts for my art materials. I got into the habit in art school, they are always helpful. I can see at a glance the color as it comes out of the tube as well as what it looks like as it is brushed out with water. I organize it by brand name to help me find the tube I want in the pile. Most days I have the tubes separated by manufacturer.

Watercolor is pretty forgiving on the palette. I use glass and old microwave plates. I can squeeze out paint, use what I want, let it dry out, wet it down again. I can be messy, if you get a bit of one color in another it doesn’t do much. I tend to keep similar colors on each plate, but it’s loose.

Oil Paint

When I have visited oil painters studios, they always seem to have super organized palettes. They keep their paint in one place, and mix them up in another area. I’m learning there are reasons for this. I’m also learning it’s not natural after getting habituated to my messy watercolor palette approach.

I started with a color chart. One of the first things that caught my eye about oil was a demonstration at a Dick Blick store by Scott Gellatly, Product Manager for Gamblin Artists Colors Co.

I know a lot about color theory in general, what got my attention was Scott knew about color in specificity. Pigment by pigment. I went to the Gamblin website and found guidance for laying out my palette according to the color chart that uses warm and cool versions of each hue. I didn’t completely follow the rules, I added Torrit Grey (a special color Gamblin makes every year from left over pigments as a recycling project for Earth Day) to the center for shades and tints. It started to give me a better understanding of how the colors mix.

I started out OK with another piece of glass to mix on. I’ve noticed a couple of things. First, oil paint is not forgiving about getting paint mixed together. A tiny drop of paint of a different color affects what you have on the knife or brush. Way more than in watercolor. My messy tendencies are problematic.

No more just letting the paint sit out to dry and then resuse. Instead I have paint covered pieces of plastic that have a lot of mess making potential. Getting them lined back up with the colors would be easy if I kept the colors in the same places as suggested, but I’ve noticed I have a lot of bad habits of just grabbing the next piece of clear glass. Shifting things around. Forgetting to completely clean off my knife before dipping into the next color.

All of this is pretty easily accommodated with some thought and slowing down. Just harder to get into a flow state where I am not having to think so much about the technical.

Using brushes for oil paint seems discouraged by many of the sources I’ve looked at about keeping toxicity minimized. My first days of playing with oils, I just used palette knifes and scrapers. I like the energy I get in the marks from the hard edge tools. They introduce a kind of controlled haphazardness that allows me to convey more of the storminess I’ve been looking for in my landscapes.

When I try to paint trees with the hard edge tools, I get frustrated. I keep picking the paint up when I’m trying to put it down. The branches look heavy or I end up scratching them out.

After being frustrated, I finally decided to just pick up a brush. So much more familiar. I like being able to control the flow of the paint by adding mediums. Not that I really understand them yet, but at least I can have a full range of marks that are more familiar.

I dreaded cleaning the  first brush, remembering the nasty smelling cans of turpentine from art school. That gave me intense headaches. I tried baby oil instead. It took the paint right out. It was way easier than I thought it would be.

I’m happy. Now I feel I can use all the tools without worrying about restrictions.

  Gamblin cold wax is why I started investigating oil painting. I was captured by the translucent glow Cynthia Herron was able to get in her abstract landscape paintings. I’ve tried encaustic in the past, which is luscious and magic, but I’m not willing to be around the toxicity of the hot wax. I breathed enough wax back when I was learning about batik.

The cold wax gets mixed 60/40 or 50/50 with Galkyd medium. This helps it dry faster and controls the level of gloss or if you want it slower, you can use Galkyd Slow Dry. This medium solution gets mixed with the paint 50/50. To start.  Which gets adjusted depending on the result you want.

There is a lot of other mediums to work with. I have a lot of experimenting to do. The Gamblin website has a lot of fabulous information about what the different mediums do. I’m starting to understand something. But that does not give me an embodied sense of what I am doing. That will take practice.

White

In watercolor, white is the paper. It must be protected from the start. Sometimes you can get paint to come back up, but only certain colors. It’s always a challenge to keep the white areas clean. Sometimes I use a latex mask, occasionally tape, but that creates another set of issues because it can rip the paper if you aren’t careful.

In oil, white is paint. Six different ones. With slightly different working qualities. Then it gets mixed into the colors, or painted on the surface. It’s not what I am accustomed to thinking about. It’s one of the reasons for the media shift. I was building layers in my watercolor map paintings and wanted to put white on the top layers. It’s useful for defining roads. I didn’t always know where things would go at the start, so I didn’t have the ability to protect the whites. I found myself compromising by adding white gouache or painting back in with watercolor ground.

Now I have a selection of different whites to learn about. And I can add it over the top of colors like I did in the painting above.

White

In watercolor, white is the paper. It must be protected from the start. Sometimes you can get paint to come back up, but only certain colors. It’s always a challenge to keep the white areas clean. Sometimes I use a latex mask, occasionally tape, but that creates another set of issues because it can rip the paper if you aren’t careful.

In oil, white is paint. Six different ones. With slightly different working qualities. Then it gets mixed into the colors, or painted on the surface. It’s not what I am accustomed to thinking about. It’s one of the reasons for the media shift. I was building layers in my watercolor map paintings and wanted to put white on the top layers. It’s useful for defining roads. I didn’t always know where things would go at the start, so I didn’t have the ability to protect the whites. I found myself compromising by adding white gouache or painting back in with watercolor ground.

Now I have a selection of different whites to learn about. And I can add it over the top of colors like I did in the painting above.