Free Lesson! 🌱 For the love of art supplies (Part 2)
Try this:
Think of your art supplies as experiences instead of a collection of treasures
The money that you spent on them was not an investment
It was more like buying a festival pass or birthday cake or a train ticket
They were never meant to stay with you forever
So use your supplies freely
It’s never a waste
This epiphany came to me on my lunch break years ago and offered me a wide open door. I had thought of the idea of buying a sketchbook and a set of paints as a kind of tuition: what would I learn if I painted them all the way through?
I lived in Portland, OR when I was in college and saw a sign once for an arts festival going on called "TBA" which stood for "time-based art." It was focused on projects and performances that took place over time: dance, theater, music and all kind of boundary-pushing performance art. I didn't go (thought I wasn't an 'art person' back then, whatever that means!), but for some reason the name stuck with me like an epiphany. Some art takes place over time while some (like paintings? I wondered) were static.
I thought of it this way until I started actually painting a decade later. The phrase kept surfacing in my mind when I began my sketchbook practice; painting actually felt like time-based art. It was a sensory experience. Brushstrokes were a kind of choreography. It was slow, and it felt like the art was in the doing, not just in the having done.
Even if an original painting and its print look identical, they are different because of the way the original came into being over time, this brushstroke over that one, the finger prints, the way it sat overnight halfway done, unsure of what it would become, if it would be finished, how one would know when it was finished. It's different because of the interaction of my body with the pigment and the paper over time.
I stopped seeing a tube of paint as an object that would be transformed in private into a different object (ie, artist makes art, hangs it on the wall), and started seeing it as my ticket to a open run of afternoons and late nights and lunch breaks working in my sketchbook, followed by a lifetime of reflection on those marks and connection with other people as I shared them.
I also found out that supplies don't last forever.
Watercolor paper is treated with something that makes the water spread out and absorb slowly and evenly. This stuff is called "sizing" and it can go bad over time. When this happens, the paint immediately soaks in and stains the paper in patches without sizing, which dry darker. I've had this happen to beautiful, expensive paper. I can't find pictures of my paper, but you can see an example here.
It's not just the paper. Paint tubes dry out. The glue holding in brush hairs gets brittle. Gouache gets moldy. I've had well sealed bottles of oil medium and masking fluid congeal from the new air in the jar after using them once. My old oil pastels got hard and waxy and difficult to use. Markers dried out even with their caps on tight.
Even when I thought of my art supplies as an experience, I still wondered if they were ones I could save up, like gift cards I'll use someday, when just the right moment presents itself. But they're much more like friendship: if you try to save it up, you'll end up missing out on it.
I also found that art supplies last a long time. Meaning: if I'm working at a sketchbook scale and I use my watercolors everyday, at a year in they won't even be half-gone. I've completely used up just maybe 5 or 6 tubes of watercolor in the past 10 years.
This is actually a situation where you can almost have your cake and eat it too. If you want your supplies to last forever, feel free to also use them! Fifteen years from now there will probably still be some half-dried up pigment in that tube and at least a few inches left on most of your colored pencils.
One thing that I love about working in my sketchbook is that it absolutely does not matter how it goes. I can make the WORST sketch in human history and nothing bad happens. It's also true that I could make the very best sketch of all time, and nothing that great happens. The paint dries, the page is turned, another sketch is laid in on the back side, the paint dries, the book is closed, and back onto my shelf it goes. There is nothing at stake.
But, it doesn't always feel this way. The parts of me that feel like I have to get it all right, that I have to be beautiful or capable or frugal, they show up ready to keep the pressure on. At first I wanted to shoo them away. I did not want their pain, so I tried to "not be a perfectionist" – I do not want to feel their fear that if I messed up everything will come falling down. Trying to get rid of them didn't help, but as I found (slowly, over time), listening did.
I've realized my sketchbook is a really safe sandbox to encounter these difficult feelings. They show up strong, not realizing how little is at stake here. But I know we're safe, so I can welcome them at their full strength. I can hear how afraid they are of ruining things. I hear their reasons: they think that if I am bad at this, if I let myself be bad at things in general, then people will make fun of me and I will be ostracized and overlooked and seen as incompetent and then I won't be able to make enough money to take care of myself and I'll die. No wonder it's a strong feeling: to this 'perfectionist' part of me, this is life and death stuff.
So I listen until I really get where these parts are coming from. Then, I paint their stories.
And over the years they get to see for themselves:
no one gets mad when we spill the paint water, and
no one makes fun of our cat painting, and
swatching out all of our colors in a row feels the same way it does to drift off to sleep listening to an easy story.
When I hold these beautiful art materials that I couldn't have afforded for a lot of my life, there's a part of me that wants to protect from ever not having art supplies again, and thinks I should save these.
But when I listen more, I find a tenderness that wants me to understand how hard it was during those times when I was younger and I didn't have everything I needed. So it brings me a grief I had tucked away. And, since my sketchbook is a great place to meet a grief, I welcome it in. I ask it to tell me more and more, that I want to really understand. I draw its portrait. It likes that. The grief begins to trust me.
Over time, my art supplies have become a physical reminder to that young grief that things are different now, that my basic needs are met and I'm okay. My sketchbook went from being a place that made me feel like I had to hold on to everything tighter to a place where I can let go.
I meet many of these kinds of feelings when I sit down to use (and use up) my supplies. I welcome them. I listen.
Hello to the desire to play and hello to the sense that things have become too serious now for that
Hello to the pressure to get things right the first time so nothing is a waste
Hello, my fear of running out of things
Hello to the feeling I have to be good at something to justify trying it
Hello to the sense that things are only good if they last forever
Hello, my grief that things don't last forever
For me, learning to use my supplies freely isn't an exercise in trying to forget about scarcity or limits, or take on a mindset of 'abundance.' It's a practice of freedom even in this world where we know what it means to not have what we need, where the future is not certain. I don't use my supplies because I'm sure that I'll always have more, but because I am mortal, and just like my supplies, saving up a life won't make it last longer either. We are each here, alive for a little while, and I don't want us to miss it.
ps. If you missed Part 1, where I wrote about the joy of collecting art supplies even if you never use them, as well as offered a detailed tour of how I organize materials in my studio, you can read it here: