Getting rid of older art

I am going to get rid of some of my older art. I actually already started: I threw away almost all the work from my student portfolio (both high school and college). I kept a couple of small pieces I particularly liked, but I didn’t see much point in continuing to hang on to charcoal still life drawings from my sophomore year. So: into the recycling bin they went.

I kept one painting that I did in college, when I was maybe 20 or 21. It’s an interpretation of “Accords” (1922) by Amédée Ozenfant, a French painter who helped found the Purist movement. It’s not top-notch, skill wise, but I really like it and I like that it is a memory, a representation of me at that phase in my life.

I have always had a hard time letting go of my artwork. No one is buying my paintings these days (and I am not working to market or publicize them widely, so no surprise there), and we are running out of wall space in the house.

Last week, I put a stack of five older paintings up in the attic. (Ah, the attic. The place where stuff goes that you can’t bring yourself to throw away, yet you don’t really want to keep either, but making a decision is too hard so you pull down the ladder and stuff it up into limbo. It’s Purgatory for all your junk.)

And I put one of my oldest paintings — a very heavy 3’x5′ painting on a hand built frame of 2x4s and metal braces — in the “garage sale” pile in the garage. That felt SUPER weird to do. Also I don’t think anyone is going to garage sales looking to buy art, so it will likely end up in the landfill.

Or maybe it will make its way up to the attic to join its spiderweb-covered brethren. (What’s the female or gender neutral equivalent of “brethren”? “Sistren”? “Siblinthren”?)

Or maybe ALL of these orphan paintings will make their way to the garage sale/landfill.

But it’s sort of felt like ripping off a bandaid, to both consider and take action on letting go of stuff that I have created. It is painful, it is a change… but afterwards I actually feel lighter and free-er. It’s interesting and I didn’t expect to feel okay about it, but I do.