The Accumulation of Things
When I packed up my house to ship the contents to New Zealand I didn’t have much time. It was unplanned and sadly, my house could have used a good sorting and organization session before I moved.
Instead I packed most everything without worrying about what I really needed. The plan was to sort it out once it arrived on the other end.
When you ship a container it goes by volume and not weight so there wasn’t much incentive to throw things out before the move.
The end result of that was, surprise, quite a large mess. I’ve acquired a lot of office type thing things over my years as an artist.
Today I’m finally getting around to getting rid of a bunch of it.
What really struck me about the clean out today? That I’ve been an artist for 20 years now. Pretty darn cool 🙂
Goodbye paper
One of my goals for 2016 was to create an (almost) paperless office. I’m tired of stacks of paper that need to be sorted and resorted and file drawers full of stuff I never read.
Thanks to technology, I’m getting rid of much of the stuff in the above photo. I switched to google calendar for daily appointment tracking and I’m using evernote for my filing cabinet.
Snapping a photo of any papers that are important (like all those annoying receipts for tax purposes) and storing them in evernote removes the need for piles of paper.
Goodbye Slides
In the pre-digital camera days, artists used slides to enter shows. I don’t miss those days. Exposing a roll of film and having no guarantees the photos would be good (I was at best an iffy photographer.)
Gone and good riddance to the days of rushing off to the photo store hoping they could develop my slides in just a few hours so I could get the slides in the mail by the entry deadline.
Yahoo for online entry. Sure some of the submission mechanisms are a bit clunky, but they are smooth sailing compared to the painful days of slides.
I’ve carried binders and binders of all my duplicate slides around with me for the past 20 years thinking I should keep them. Today that thought ended.
I pulled a single copy of each image for older artwork that sold before I could get a digital image. The rest – into the bin.
Thousand dollars of photographic work gone in a matter of minutes.
What was I Doing?
I have been keeping a record of how I spent my studio time for many years and only have the data for the last 10 years, because that was when I moved the tracking into my sketch book.
I thought I had lost all of the data for previous years but today I came across my studio activity for 1998. Twenty years ago!
20 years as an artist and I’m still doing the same things – making art, writing artist statements, entering exhibits, packing up artwork to ship.
And even teaching – I found a few entries for submitting proposals for teaching and prepping to teach.
I am a creature of habit.