Earlier this week, I was minding my own business, putting the house bin out for the fortnightly collection, and the spirit of Spring Cleaning took hold of me.
I started on the yard, moving the easiest things to sort, moving all the potted plants around, rearranging the driftwood, and clearing some of the lower-fired pieces (bowls that I use for reclaiming ash and clays) that failed over the winter. I moved inside and pulled apart all of my drawing studio, finding three bags of rubbish, an entire bag of driftwood and a bag of yet-to-be-assembled plinths.
Bud Vase on a similar plinth cut from scraps of materials
Such a deep spring clean has me evaluating what is useful after I found fragments of corrugated cardboard one centimetre wide by ten, maybe fifteen centimetres long. The me right now is sometimes puzzled by my past self and what I valued in the moment. At times, as an artist, I have not had very much money, so I have clung onto materials long past their usefulness. And then there are the cheap materials that you buy when you are starting out, like 20-year-old cheapest of the cheap watercolour papers that don’t state what they are made of and have gone brown, yet the cartridge paper and other materials haven’t and have been stored in the same conditions.
Then, I saw this video, and I hadn’t realised sizing fails on watercolour paper, and it has changed my mind on my drawer full of watercolour paper. I should use all my papers and replenish them every so often; I shouldn’t keep things for when I get better because they will spoil. My mind wanders to materials that you have never used, like the many canvases; they sit on a shelf unused and unloved, and I don’t like painting on canvas, but I bought them to try and do commissions on and then all my commissions have been on paper since. Just work on paper and plywood for painting and buy them when I need them rather than having drawers and shelves full of unused materials.
This has also made me reconsider getting more than a dozen of anything printed at any given time. And then consider not printing at all unless it is a paid project (I have one coming up where we have a budget for several hundred prints to give out). Having more regular clear-out of subpar paintings so they don’t sit around for years, leaving future me to sort it out.
I think this spring cleaning is going to change my work practice.