If you follow some of my social media accounts you’ll probably know that I’m in Istanbul, Turkey at the moment. I arrived towards the end of the year and have been here for about 5 months now. Before I left I had to move 20 years worth of stuff into one small room.
Most of my “stuff” is art or art supplies and it wasn’t all going to fit into one room. I’ve always been terrible at selling paintings, partly because I’m a collector (nice way of saying hoarder) and partly because I’m just not good with sales (and/or my paintings are just bad).
I didn’t count them but I must have had hundreds of paintings and probably a thousand drawings. They dated back to my first few oil paintings that I ever did. I can’t remember the date and I can’t check now as I’m in Istanbul. I’ll have to photograph them and share them someday.
Anyway, getting back to the art studio cull. I had one small room to put everything and I had a big studio filled with paintings and drawings. I also had just a few weeks to do everything as the Istanbul opportunity was a very last minute thing that wasn’t planned.
So I started culling a few paintings that had always bothered me. They weren’t quite right and should have never been considered finished paintings.
It felt good. I had been wanting to repaint them for years but slicing through the canvas and then smashing the stretchers felt liberating.
I felt lighter. A load had been taken off my shoulders.
It was summer in Australia, I was sweating, and I couldn’t stop. I just kept on slashing and cutting and ripping and breaking painting after painting.
Hours passed and probably one hundred paintings were destroyed. I was exhausted, sweating and covered in dirt and grime from paintings up to 20 years old. I felt great.
I paused for the day though as I wanted to see if I regretted destroying so many paintings, the things that I had treasured and identified with all of my adult life. It was like burning old diaries or love letters.
I let my actions sit with me for 24 hours. Of course I would rather keep them all, it’s my nature, I like hoarding. But I simply didn’t have the room to store them, the money to pay for storage, or the time to either sell them cheap or even give them away.
So it was the right thing to do. I didn’t feel regret. I felt free from hundreds of kilograms of oil paints, canvas, paper, and boards.
I swear if I went outside and flapped my arms a few times I would have flew away. Actually I should have flown myself to Istanbul and saved myself a couple of thousand dollars.. lol
The decision was final. The painting cull would continue. Over the next several days I cut, tore and smashed my way through hundreds of paintings and drawings.
At one point the pile of slashed paintings was higher than me. It could have been an installation piece. Actually the whole thing could have been an art performance piece. I should have at least filmed the process. Which reminds me, I just started my own Artist Youtube channel. Please subscribe.
In the end, I kept a large cupboard filled with paintings and a pile of maybe 100 drawings. I also kept all the paintings and drawings of other artists that I have bought or swapped over the years, so don’t worry if I have some of your work in my collection.
It was one of the most therapeutic and liberating things I’ve ever done. I highly recommend all artists do it from time to time. Not as extremely as I did it, but just go through your work and get rid of the ones that you’re unsure about.
Not everything you paint is going to be as good as it can be. In fact if you’re not regularly producing bad paintings then you’re not trying hard enough. It’s easy to find a painting that works (sells) and then you just keep repeating it. You won’t make mistakes with a painting that you’ve painted a thousand time but your whole oeuvre will be a mistake as you’ve simply become a breathing photocopier.
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