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.

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.

This is what friends gear up for.

This month I attended a memorial for two beloved people and it's left me tender in spots. What I'm noticing a lot while I read isn't necessarily about art but about friendship. I could argue for a relationship between the two, but if you can't do that for yourself, you don't have the right friends. Here's what I heard lately.

From an episode of the lamented Sports Night, mostly written by Aaron Sorkin:

I came here to tell you that, no matter what you decide, you've got friends. This is what friends gear up for.

And from an episode of the great West Wing, also mostly written by Aaron Sorkin:

This guy's walkin' down a street when he falls in a hole. The walls are so steep he can't get out. A doctor passes by and the guy shouts up, "Hey, you, can you help me out?" The doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole, and moves on. Then a priest comes along and the guy shouts up, "Father, I'm down in this hole. Can you help me out?" The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole, and moves on. Then a friend walks by. "Hey, Joe, it's me. Can you help me out?" And the friend jumps in the hole. Our guy says, "Are you stupid? Now we're both down here!" The friend says, "Yeah, but I've been down here before and I know the way out."

I'm also hearing about that particular sort of friend, the ally. Here's an anecdote from the remarkable writer, Nalo Hopkinson, about the legendary writer, Samuel "Chip" Delaney:

Years later, I was at a con with Chip when a young man asked him a question. That young man, gay and black, as Chip is, had just attended a writing workshop where he'd found it very difficult to get recognition about why the things he was writing about were important. He asked Chip how a black gay man could find his voice in science fiction. Almost before the words were out of his mouth, a white woman overrode him with, "well, I just don't see race in my life. I don't make it a problem. I don't see race. It just doesn't exist as an issue."

Very gently, Chip replied, "If you can't see something that threatens my life daily, then you can't help me fight it. You can't be my ally."

And I was charmed and moved by the anonymous one-sentence commencement addresses proposed in the comments column of the PostSecret blog recently, such as:

loving the imperfect makes us love our own imperfections

There is no such thing as a soulmate.

I have mixed feelings about this one, I confess, but it too is making me think about the role of friendship in my life:

As you get older, you need more people who knew you when you were younger.

This advice from Robert Anton Wilson is for my braver days:

You should view the world as a conspiracy run by a very closely-knit group of nearly-omnipotent people, and you should think of those people as yourself and your friends.

And as I was preparing this entry, I was chatting with a friend in another tab. I'd confessed I was blue and asked him to tell me stories. Here's one of the things Parthipan Siva told me tonight:

big sign in your office, home where ever "Am I enjoying what I am doing?"

if you answer no you probably are on top of everest jumping for the moon thinking everyone is on the moon when in reality they haven't even made it up everest yet

not to say you can't reach the moon but it would be easier after resting at the top of everest

That's why we invest in friends, for advice about Everest. (Thanks, Parthi.)

It's going to be easier for him to accomplish the hard work.

Surprise! I'm thinking about tennis today. No, I don't play tennis. But Rafael Nadal plays it very well, and his uncle, Toni Nadal, is still his coach. What does the lifelong coach of a star athlete have to say? Cynthia Gorney reported for the New York Times this week, and here's what stood out for me.

“It’s about respect,” Toni [Nadal] told me. “It’s really easy for these guys to start thinking the world revolves around them. I never could have tolerated it if Rafael [Nadal] had become a good player and a bad example of a human being. I was at a symposium recently and a trainer said to me, ‘Look, if you ask a young player’s father which he’d rather get at the end of this process — a courteous person or the French Open champion — you know what that father is going to say.’ And I said: ‘No, that’s all wrong. Because if that player is brought up courteous, brought up as a respectful person, he’s got a better chance to reach the championship of the French Open — because it’s going to be easier for him to accomplish the hard work.’ ”

and this

Juega cada punto como si fuera el último. They say at the tournaments that this is what Toni Nadal still hammers at his nephew: Play every point as though it were the last— of the game, of the match, of the day, of your life. “It’s out of respect for the sport,” Toni told me when I asked him about it. “If you’re going to do a thing, do it absolutely the best you can. Did I ever say it to him directly? No. In my family, there were lots of things my father never said to me. You just see them, in the attitude. From the time Rafael was little, he’d win that first point of the match, which nobody ever pays much attention to, and he’d yell, ‘Vamos!’ All pumped up. Let’s go! And you play like you train. As he grew up, he got used to training as though each point were the last one.”