chriswoodartist

Most artists use a wide variety of surfaces to work on. We also have a lot of materials, equipment and piles of finished artwork. Some focussed creatives only have one discipline – not me – I am multi-disciplinary and consequently I have far more kit than most ! I aspire to being one of that rare breed of artists who are organised minimalists.

I can fill a room extraordinarily quickly, every piece of furniture, every wall, every scrap of floor space quickly becomes engulfed ! I am a health and safety nightmare !  I have tried buying plastic crates to organise my equipment into but they just get full and remain in teetering piles all over the floor. Whilst I usually stand up to work, it gets tiring after a while and I like a sit down to recover, so in most of my studios I have at least a couple of chairs which are always full of stuff  ! At least I no longer have a cat so on the rare occasions, when said chair is empty, the cat no longer takes up residence  !

Storage is a perennial problem for the artist and I had thought about converting my loft and using it as storage for my archive but I know what would happen – it would degenerate into yet another tip ! Loft conversions are great but you need to be more agile and have better knees than I possess ! So I won’t be going down that rabbit hole! Tidying and organising and most probably throwing away most of my possessions is the only way to go and that definitely goes against the grain.

What makes matters worse is I have now been a professional artist for 50 years – so I have considerably more stuff than I had when I was just starting out. In those halcyon days I largely did 2D work which made life easier, then in my thirties I made a return to sculpture . . . now 40 years on I have a shed/workshop/garden studio, where I keep far too much timber – just in case it’s useful.

To return to floors I quite enjoy seeing a large expanse of polished floorboards and when I recently emptied out my teaching space at the Omega Centre it was a delight to see an empty studio !