Linda teaches art

How to store art stuff in the real world

I grew up in the Canadian Armed Forces and attended 7 schools in 11 years. Then I attended university in a co-op program for which I moved 15 times. I know a thing or two about packing, moving, and storage.

The first five rules of storing stuff

Rule 1: Don't store food.

And when you do store food, store it in air-tight containers.

Keep in mind that your commemorative slice of wedding cake is actually food. To moth larvae, wool sweaters are food. To silverfish, books are food. To a mouse or squirrel, everything en route to food is bedding.

Rule 2: Keep everything dry.

Beware of damp basements, leaky garages, or that one soggy brush or damp towel that gets packed prematurely.

Rule 3: Don't hide flammable stuff. Label it.

Ditto poisonous stuff and knives. A test question: If I saw someone toss this box toward me, would I catch it, or dodge?

Rule 4: Even if you're just storing stuff in the attic, pack and label the fragile stuff as if you were going to move.

You might move. You might sell the house. You might get so rich you can pay someone to schlep your gear to your glamorous new studio. Every time I store stuff, plans change. If someone else ends up shifting the boxes, un-gently and across great distances, will your stuff be okay?

Rule 5: Unless you're 100% certain your storage space is reliably climate controlled, don't store anything that can't freeze or bake.

To name just a few of the things that have caused me regret: Paint, snowdomes, aerosol cans, media, solvents, wax, oil pastels, crayons...

Art-specific tips on storing stuff

Galleries, museums and people of unlimited resources can hire conservators to pack their art collections for climate-controlled storage in secured archives. Artists make do.

Tip 1: Store everything flat, not rolled.

Tip 2: Protect canvases from accidental punctures.

You may staple corrugated cardboard to the back of the stretcher temporarily (not permanent, reduces air flow). Don't stuff a small one inside a large one, or lean a short one against the face of a tall one. Those dents in the canvas never go away, and sometimes turn into holes.

Tip 3: Store canvases on edge.

Don't stack them like pancakes.

If you must store paintings touching, store them face to face rather than than face to back. There's just too much rough stuff on the back of a canvas.

Tip 3: Acrylic paint sticks together no matter how dry it is.

There's actually a Golden varnish you can use as a topcoat to prevent this, but no one does and you probably don't have time. You must put separator sheets in between, something clean. Newsprint is cheap and acidic; won't do much harm in medium term to acrylics but I could imagine it yellowing and staining a very pale painting. Tracing paper or pages out of half-used or cheap sketchbooks? For small work, I've used wax paper. The conservators will use acid-free tissue. The conservators have more money and fewer paintings than we do.

Tip 4: Minimize shuffling drawings.

There is no spray fixative on the planet strong enough to secure drawing media to paper in the face of direct contact and friction. It's too bad none of us can afford to store each drawing on its own shelf. We stack them like playing cards and avoid shuffling the deck.

Store drawings face to back rather than face to face. I store drawings in portfolios, even portfolios made of big sheets of cardboard and duct tape. If I can afford it, I put sheets of newsprint between them. If I'm rich, I put pieces of cheap white paper in between them.

And it should go without saying but...

Tip 5: Label everything.

We all get tired and rushed; we all compromise on labelling; we all regret it.

Tell 'em what you're trying to teach.

The deliciously readable Swiss Miss asked her readers for teaching advice this week and art/design teachers are chiming in from all over. I joined them, of course:

I’m a big believer in foregrounding your teaching objectives. Tell ‘em what you’re trying to teach. Enlist the students as a collaborators in their own educations.

We all know the weaknesses of critiques. Chatty self-congratulation and mutual admiration. Instructor monologues delivering a public grading. Student self-defense over-explaining what they tried to do at the expense of hearing what they actually did. Other students chirping up carelessly (or cruelly) to demonstrate Participation.

But the tone changes noticeably when we remember what critiques teach us. We’re not there to become critics, although some of us will. We’re there to practise observing work and assessing its strengths and weaknesses. This is the most important skill of a creative practitioner: the ability to judge the progress and accomplishment of a piece of work for ourselves. Because, kids, once you leave the classroom and the shared studio, it’s lonely out there and I’m not in charge, any more, of telling you when it’s good and when it’s bad and when it’s fresh and when it’s done. You are.

Critiques look like they’re about external validation but they’re really about the gradual transfer of authority from the instructor to the artist. I like to tell ‘em so.

I husband my courage.

The best creative advice I've read this week comes from a computer scientist, Ivan Sutherland, in his extraordinary essay, Technology and Courage. He says:

If you can find things that bolster your own self confidence, you can use them to good effect. I find that I have only so much room for taking risks. When I can reduce the risk in some places in my life, I can more easily face risk in other areas. I provide myself the courage to do some things by reducing my need for courage in other areas. In effect, I husband my courage.

I'm rolling those lovely words around on my tongue, and chasing them down with this observation by painter Chuck Close, from an interview with Anna Deavere Smith at the Aspen Institute. The hour-long interview is available on FORA.tv, a pleasure I stumbled across by accident and bookmarked immediately.

Those of us who are not destroyed by our problems, we got a lot of self-confidence from being able to compete in a world where we have one arm tied behind our back and still manage to find a way to be successful. And if it doesn't destroy you, it makes you a pretty interesting person.

And back to courage, which is the subtext of all creativity... Wil Wheaton told this story on his blog recently.

Fun fact: David [Gerrold] wrote and sold The Trouble with Tribbles when he was 19. My wife Anne asked him how he had the courage to do that, and David told her, "Because nobody told me I couldn't." That's so awesome, and everyone who is creative should commit that to memory.

Someone emailed me recently asking if it's really possible to paint using a Cyan/Magenta/Yellow (CMY), or "process colour" model. He's run into skepticism from working artists, and I'm not surprised. So, let's start with the most important thing. The late great Douglas Adams once said

"Anything that’s invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of things."

Artists couldn't paint with CMY until we had a stable, lightfast M to work with. I didn't see one on the market until the 1990s. So there aren't many practising painters who trained with M paint. We're practical people, artists, and when it comes to making work, we're surprisingly conservative. We use the materials we know. We want our paintings to last for centuries and we generally use only the tried and true materials with which we trained. Hey, we're experts at how to use two different reds, one for orange and one for purple, so that's what we do. As the saying goes, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. My father drives stick instead of automatic, and I send email instead of text messages. We'd both argue we've chosen the superior technology but you know it's also because we got good at it before we turned 35 and don't see any reason to change.

If you want to persuade a painter, you'll have the most luck with watercolourists, who are fond of a colour called Opera from Holbein, which is a very useful magenta that some people would call pink. It's not quite lightfast but it's still a favourite.

 As for me, I trained in the classic RYB model and my thinking is still rooted there, but I have enough science education to be pretty comfortable talking about the relationship between additive and subtractive colour, the RYB model, the CMY model, and the RGB model we need to describe light.

The CMY colour model is about light, but paint relies on pigment. Pigments don't arise on the planet in optically pure colours conveniently corresponding to wavelengths of visible light. There are single-pigment paints that are close to being optically pure primaries (for magentas, you'll want to look at colours with quinacridone), but nothing perfect. There are manufactured paints that are damned close, usually gouache meant for (ephemeral) use in graphic design, but they won't be single pigment.

Here's a kickass web page that assesses a whack of magenta pigments for lightfastness. It's not a casual read (but then, upon reflection, neither is this blog entry) but it looks rock solid and matches all of my own experience with pigments like quinacridone. Looking around the site, Bruce Macavoy does an outstanding job on colour theory. Not for beginners, perhaps, but check it out.

If you want to learn to paint in a CMY model, I recommend the System 3 line of acrylics from Daler Rowney, which includes CM and Y (and sells a handy five-colour Process Set for just this purpose). It's a student grade rather than high end. It's reasonably but not thoroughly permanent. But the colours are very good primaries.

For your first exercise, take a small amount of Y and mix dabs of M into it, very gradually, painting samples onto a clean page, until you get to red. It's a mind-blowing experience and you'll want to make everyone you know try the same experiment. Especially the painters.

Good things come out of incomprehension.

I can't express how charming I find Maira Kalman's work. You just have to try it on for size yourself. 

Maira Kalman, "May it please the court" in the New York Times

Her blog, And The Pursuit of Happiness,

Maira Kalman, Moleskine sketchbook, on YouTube

She's as quirky and freewheeling in speech as she is on the page, which I find additionally charming in a creative-mystic-guru sort of way, although I concede that some listeners will find her odd. But she won me over early with her observation that "Good things come out of incomprehension." Check her out at at TED on YouTube.