Artists and Collecting

Artists are often found to be ‘hoarders’ in the eyes of others. Myself included. I find this to not be the case. We are collectors of visual input. Why store ALL of your ideas in your head or in photos when you could have the items that inspired those idea right beside your desk?

I have easily thousands of small toys, probably almost 50 board games, random art materials across many disciplines, all types of paint despite not even liking some of them, paper I think I could maybe collage together at some point in my life, and even things I want to save to use with my future students. For me, I thrive to create within an excess of visual and objective input. That is why my studio looked the way it did.

While yes, I have a lot of stuff that I would never use for art in my collection, I can’t get rid of them, simply because I’d forget about the object. Objects have stories, history, sentimentality. Throwing away an item that is a living, breathing artifact is a really hard though for me to swallow. I may never use it now, but what if I decide, “I should use that 3D printed pink foot for this piece!”, and it’s not there!

More is more!