Editing Stuff

For the first five or six decades of life, it's as if we're all climbing some hill in our heads--getting, as best we can, the stuff we need to complete the picture called What My Life Is Going To Look Like.  

The very first choice I made in that direction was choosing the china, crystal and silverware to set a table and have dinner parties.  I barely knew how to cook, but so what?  Married people were supposed to throw dinner parties, right?  Place settings were advertised in Seventeen and Bride magazines to get us there.  Not recipes, but the carriers of food and drinks to mouths.

I have rarely had a dinner party.  I used to cook for people and always for my family, but I don't even do that anymore.  Yesterday we celebrated Will's and Veronica's pair of 44th birthdays together at a Thai restaurant.  

We sold our wedding silver to buy a dog--a German Shepherd named Tony, a dog I'll never forget. The silver was returned to a department store a knife and a fork at a time until we had enough money to buy the dog. Then the set was incomplete, so we sold the rest.

We didn't actually have a table anyway, just a three-legged one that we propped on the radiator, and a series of rental houses with not enough space for dinner parties.  All I'm saying is that my Big Hill of the time didn't match my imagination. 

Along the way, there were other hills, smaller than Whole Life Hills, but hills nonetheless.  

Now, most of us have reached an age when we're acquiring way less.  We know what we need for the real lives we have. In fact, most of us--like Barbel on a smaller scale--are letting things go, even beautiful and potentially useful things. 

Learning to paint and collage was a hill I started three years ago. I bought all the sets of paints, papers, brushes and do-dads I saw crafters and artists using on You Tube.  

I had fun playing with supplies, so I don't regret it.  But now I'm editing them, giving away what I'm no longer likely to use--like glitter and paint colors I don't care for, magenta, some greens. 

Having learned to mix my own colors with primary red, blue and yellow, and black and white, I don't need sets of colors. Cooks know that the main event of a meal is the deliciousness of the food, not the plates and glasses and forks.  

I've spent the weekend organizing my painted papers and gel prints into four baskets--cool colors, warm colors, black and white, and neutrals.  I'm  more likely to use them if I can find the color I want without searching through stacks and stacks of pages. 

One of my new favorite art teachers taught me this.  

My previous work space was more like a buffet--too much for anything to feel special. This newly sorted space feels clean, more user friendly.  What's left will find its way into collages and painted compositions. Sometimes less really is more.