In one of the quiet hours between Christmas and New Year, I find myself scrolling down my Canva account looking at all the e-books, courses, newsletters and inspirational posts I wrote during the first years of the Wild Creative Studio.
10 Ways to Share Your Creative Harvest
Intention Setting for a New Year
Boundaries Practice for Artists
It’s old work but still relevant, and hard for me to let go of.
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In a wild moment I decide I should delete my Instagram account but then realize I have hours of writing work in the captions (not to mention ALL of my art portfolio in the images). I quickly move my finger away from the delete button. Old work captured in an app.
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On December 30th - one day before the deadline - I pay $60 to Washington State to renew my limited liability company for 2023, even though very little has run through its accounts for the last two years. More old work that’s hard to let go of.
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While “organizing” my studio I pull out a series of canvas and paper-based works on the theme of abstracted garden plans that I created two years ago. It’s never been shown. Is two year old work “old work”? It feels old - I’m not making abstract art now.
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Whatever your art medium, we all have “old work”: a back catalogue, a portfolio, a gazillion notes books, files on a laptop, canvases stacked up against a wall. What do we do with it? Last week I wrote about the stagnancy that sometimes comes with the ending of a large project and how I’m wrestling with sorting and cataloguing that work. My less than sensible solution to those sticky feelings has been to add fuel to the fire and turn attention to my entire back catalogue of works. Yeah, that will work Jacqueline, just keep throwing ten year old pieces of art on the “think about a bit more” pile until it touches the ceiling!
Dealing with my written works has seemed an easier option than sorting my visual art but I’ve quickly realized that my writing is all over the place - metaphorically and physically. There are chunks of writing in Word, morsels in OneNote, paragraphs in my Instagram captions, whole courses in the Canva app, several books hidden in Mailchimp emails (going back ten years!), lists and quick outlines of ideas in the Notes app on my phone, and now I’ve added Substack to all of that too. And don’t ask me about the huge basket of journals I have sitting under my desk, all filled with notes and ideas and musings and dreams and…a lot of rubbish too. Urgh! Where to start?
My visual art is better in the sense that at least the majority of it is physical (not counting my Procreate work that I just remembered!) and not hidden away on laptops for which I no longer remember the password. But it too is distributed like cumulus clouds across the sky: in lumpy collections of sketchbooks, small and large paper works, canvases of all sizes, strange textile sculptures and very old stitched pieces that span twenty years of making - I am THAT old! There are an abundance of what I call “oddities” - these are the last pieces of projects that sold out apart from that one work that sits alone in a corner of my studio, totally unrelated to anything else, reminding me that it’s unloved and unwanted. I find those orphan pieces really hard to deal with, they pull at my heart strings.
So what ARE we to do with old work? I don’t have a definitive answer and I’m interested in how you approach this challenge but I do have 5 guidelines that you may find useful, see what you think and leave your comments below.
Get it all out! You have to know the scope of the problem before you can solve it, so I recommend getting all your work (as far as you can) out on the walls, on the kitchen table, on your sofa - wherever you can find space. I know an artist who rents a hotel room for a weekend to do this with her writing work. If all your writing is digitally stored, try and get it on one laptop or in one folder/series of folders or consider printing it out if there’s not too much of it. Don’t forget writing that is hidden within social media apps, sometimes this is your best, unfiltered writing (it is mine). Most apps allow you to download all your content and it’s wise to do this from time to time as a backup in case that app suddenly disappears, or you angrily delete it after having a heated discussion with some random misogynist in the comments.
Put like with like. Try and find pattern and order within your body of work. This is one of the benefits of taking an overview of your art, you can see the trends, themes and patterns that make the work uniquely yours. I do a bit of an evaluation at this point and pull out pieces that obviously look or feel out of place with the rest of my work. I also put aside pieces that need a bit of tweaking, reframing, or repair.
Catalogue. This is so important for all artists. I’ve been pulling out work that I don’t even remember making, and some of it is pretty good and shouldn’t be hidden away. You can make cataloguing as simple or as complicated as you wish: an excel spreadsheet works just as well as the fancy software that’s marketed directly to artists. I use an app called iArtView which I have on my phone and this works great for me. I record the date, size, medium, title of work, dates shown and sold along with a photo. Remember to date all your work! I’ve been going through all my paper drawings and signing and dating the back - it’s amazing how the years go by and you forget when you made something. Cataloguing includes taking good photos of visual art, so set enough time aside for this and make sure your images are large enough that they suffice for both social media AND exhibition entries; there’s nothing more frustrating than having to drag out old work to take new photos because you used your cell phone first time round to snap a quick photo for Instagram - ahem, that’s me!
Don’t make hasty decisions. Once sorted and catalogued I usually find it easier to make decisions around the work. Often those orphan pieces become raw canvases for new work or are chopped up to use as collage material. However, I do caution against making hasty decisions around destroying work. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve ripped up whole series of works and then a few years later looked back at photos and thought, that was pretty good, why did I destroy it?! Remember that we cannot be reasonable critics of our own art. Get a fellow artist to take a look at pieces you’re about to consign to the compost bin or store them away for another year so you can get some distance from the work for a while. You may feel differently about it in the future.
Plan to store or share. I don’t believe all our art needs to be shown or shared with others. I have writing that will only ever be read by me. I have paintings that I don’t want to share right now. I don’t always need others to witness my expression of self, but that doesn’t make the art go away, it still sits in the studio taking up space. If you are storing visual art for its legacy value (I totally am) then make sure it’s wrapped and corners are protected. For paper-based works, consider investing in those envelope type portfolios made of card that will keep your work flat and clean and use a different portfolio per series or project so work can easily be located. You will feel so professional if you do this! If your goal is to share/sell old work, then make a plan for how you could do this. One of the big barriers to displaying/selling old work is that it doesn’t feel like us anymore; we’ve maybe moved forward in our practice and don’t paint/draw/write/take photos etc like that anymore, or maybe we deal with completely different concepts now. This is tricky. I feel that way about some of my old work. I want to hear how you handle this. My suggestions are: if it’s writing, pop the work in a zine or small book and don’t overthink it; if it’s visual art, create your own retrospective and offer VIP pricing to your collectors/subscribers/followers, and again, don’t overthink it.
I mentioned the word “professional” above. I really don’t care if folks consider me to be a professional artist or a hobbyist - there’s more important stuff to worry about in the world - but I suppose if I did care about such titles, one of the differences between me playing at art and me taking it seriously, would be that I take myself through the above exercises and many others like it. If I didn’t care about art as a discipline, as an industry, as a vocation, then I’d just create art and throw it away or paint over it straight away. I wouldn’t assign value to my old work, I’d just let it get dusty and tattered. I certainly wouldn’t bother cataloguing my art.
And so, that brings me full circle. What to do with old work? Give it attention. Look after it. My old work is worthy of care because I AM a professional artist. Old work should be protected because that’s what professionals do, we don’t allow our back catalogues to be destroyed, that’s our legacy. And professionals care about legacy. A lot.
Until next time.
JC
I realize I haven’t addressed the issue of dealing with old work that takes the form of a business or organization - like the Wild Creative Studio. I’m working through my thoughts on this and will post something soon.
Resources
If you’re thinking of investing in art inventory software, this is a good review of the options available: https://www.softwareadvice.com/art-gallery/
Here’s the app I use: iArtView
Thank you for sharing this - it has given me plenty to ponder thank you. It looks like iArtView is a paid app these days apart from something very basic I think. I sometimes make a recent body of work into a book using the Photobooks app which gives me a nice, crisp printed copy to slide into my bookshelf which works for me.
There is something of a feeling of standing on a cliff edge when throwing work out, but I think that can be helpful too. It's OK for me sometimes but I log it first in photos and put them into my studio log book with a comment or two when I'm organised enough.
Thanks very much for your writing as always x
I like how you turn the challenge of old work into a creative conundrum: something new and wonderful could come from the aluminium. I’ll take a look at artwork archive, i think that’s one they review in the article i shared. Thanks for being here.