WHAT DO YOU DO WITH “LEFTOVER” ART?

“Leftover Art”.  Every artist has it.  No one knows what to do with it. 

Leftover Art is the art you made two or three years ago (or more) that is good but not that good. 

Leftover Art is the art that you have schlepped from art fair to art fair for a couple of years to no avail.  No one bought your Leftover Art, not at any price.

Leftover Art is the art that is not quite as good as what you are creating now. 

Leftover Art is the art that is the precursor to your current style. 

Leftover Art is the art that you are just, simply over; done with; finished.   You're tired of it.

Leftover Art is the art that you now have doubts about (we artists are chronically insecure about our art), given that it hasn’t sold in a couple of years.

Leftover Art is the art that you don’t want to show because you don’t want your adoring “public” (aka your mother and your friends) to wonder what on earth it is that you do all day, which they would if you continued to attempt to sell the art that you had created years ago. 

All of these categories constitute “leftover” art.  Just like leftovers from dinner two nights ago, you’re not up for reheating them.

So what do you do with your Leftover Art? 

Leftover Art is too good to simply throw in the dumpster.  After all, if it was good enough to sell two years ago, it is probably still very good.   You don’t want to sell Leftover Art for the cost of materials alone lest you devalue your current work and anger your buyers who purchased a similar piece for full price back in the day.

So do you stack your leftover art in your garage, storage room or, more likely, in the guest room and wait for a museum to call your children to solicit work for a retrospective show?  Do you mark down the price to a number that you think the pieces will sell for, call it “bin art” and hope your collectors never find out you did this?  Or do you give your Leftover Art away to the local thrift shop and hope that poor but tasteful people whom you don’t know and will never meet buy your Leftover Art?

What on earth do you do with Leftover Art?

This is a problem that perplexes all of us.  I recently attended a four artist panel discussion at the wonderful Plus + Gallery here in Denver.  The four artists on the panel were well established and had been creating beautiful art for years and years.  They too had Leftover Art, although given the beauty and quality of their work, it was hard to imagine that they ever had anything “leftover”.  They briefly discussed storage solutions, which ranged from one's garage to an empty semi trailer.  

When someone in the audience piped up, “I’ll take it,” referring, of course, to one artist’s Leftover Art, the artist grimaced and said something gently dismissive.  He was not willing to simply give his art away.  I concur with that sentiment but that doesn’t solve the problem, does it?  I (and probably you) still have Leftover Art stacked up somewhere.

So, what do YOU do with your Leftover Art?  I’d love to hear your solutions.

Rock on.