Organizing Finished Work
If you’ve been making work for years or even for just a few months, you’ve probably amassed a sizable collection of completed work. What do you do with it all? Where do you store it all?
This past week, I found all my finished works on paper and sketchbooks because I was looking for specific pieces that had been requested for an art licensing agreement. These were older works that I wasn’t even sure I had anymore. No pressure! Picture me pulling the works from closets, from random stacks in my studio and from piles in baskets, and from bookcases around the house.
Meanwhile, amidst all this chaos, I’m reading Art Inc, by Lisa Congdon, where she suggests scanning and photographing every completed piece for online storage as soon as you complete it so that you’ll always have a copy ready to go.
Lesson learned. I need a better way to organize my completed work both in real life and digitally.
My finished pieces shouldn’t be stored like a pile of scraps.
There’s so much more to being an artist than just making work.
I’ll admit, I threw out a large stack of collages. They were older pieces that I didn’t think were worth saving because of the composition or the colors. This was the second time this year that I had a significant clean-out, and I didn’t regret the last one, so I hope I won’t regret this one.
Going forward, how will I handle things differently?
I scan most of my work, so it’s not too much of a stretch to think I could title each piece and save it online in files or in Artwork Archive.
I don’t think I’d bother doing that much work with sketchbook pieces, but anything that I spend a lot of time on and think might be sold or used somehow should be organized. I spend a lot of my time scanning work and I think that I forget that I’ve already scanned the work because I don’t organize anything.
The physical pieces all need titles, dates, and signatures on the backs and I have to get them out of the basement and into a flat file. I have two of these archival storage boxes, currently filled with paper, that I’ll have to repurpose for artwork storage.
The problem with all of this is that it’s not fun work. I want to be making more collages, not spending an entire day on the computer. In the end, if I start working in a more organized way, I might not have to spend a day on the computer. Every collage will already be scanned and organized for easy access. I’ll get there.