No Big Rush to Get it Right

I guess you will all be glad to hear about something besides our move. But not having moved in 23 years makes me wring my hands, worry a lot, lose even more sleep than usual, and generally think of this as truly life changing. Which it always is, whatever one’s circumstances. But for an artist, I think it’s even bigger.

I had a chuckle all to myself yesterday out in the space that was my garage studio. I had avoided it long enough and finally had to decide how I was going to pack all of my collage papers, collected over years of choosing and accumulating wonderful handmade papers, magazine pages, bits of fabric, lace, trim, buttons, and thread, pellon for making templates, stencils, cutout shapes for tracing, and the list goes on.

I imagined the conversation between my husband and myself should he catch me in the act of boxing up “just a bunch of paper.” Only an artist can understand the need for rich variety in creating collage. To a civilian it’s just a bunch of paper. But to an artist, those are the palette and the paints, and they can’t just be purchased like regular art supplies. I taped the box as fast as I could, so we wouldn’t have to have that conversation.

There’s another rather small box containing everything to make marks with, excluding my acrylic paints. There are watercolors in tubes, fabric paints, silkscreen inks, gouaches, both chalk and oil pastels, watercolor pencils . . . and even some crayons.

Another box holds my papermaking supplies, including a stash of really nice thick cotton linters, some wonderful papers, (more paper!)  and some small hand-built frames and deckles — a collection I put together in order to teach a one-day workshop a few years ago. Papermaking is such a delight — so clean and thoroughly pleasurable. Naturally I couldn’t throw that out, so it’s neatly packed up and labeled.

Then there are the encaustics that I put together one summer. Those supplies, including beautiful colors of paints that I mixed beginning with beeswax and damar resin, slowly heated and dissolved, then portioned out and combined with oil paints, and the sacrificed big electric griddle, will be boxed together. To make encaustic paints is a labor of love. Nope, not leaving those behind either.

The fun part is knowing I’ll be organized at least one more time in my life. I’m not sure how soon that will be, but there’s no big rush to get it right.

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