Trying to throw away a year of scraps and failing badly

I spent the morning sorting a box of offcuts I've been keeping since last spring. Anything smaller than a stamp goes into it. Hand-marbled endpapers from a 1901 hymnal I took apart, mostly. Some scraps I have not touched in eleven months and will not touch. I know this.

Still could not do it. The box went back on the shelf, slightly tidier, which is not the same as emptied.

The whole point of collage is that you take things apart, so the hoarding makes no sense on paper. Then again the scraps are the work. Every piece I have finished came out of a box like that one.

I'm not asking for advice. I think I just wanted to write down that I failed at a very small task, in a room by myself, and it took the whole morning.

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8 comments

Giulia Bruno·2w

The part that gets me is "the scraps are the work." I don't think that's a rationalization you're making to avoid the bin. In printmaking we have this whole vocabulary for it, the edition, the proof, the cancelled plate, and the leftover is never neutral, it's the negative of the decision you made. I keep a flat file of rejected proofs I will never exhibit. Someone once asked why I don't just throw them out and I didn't have a good answer, but I think the answer is that discarding them would feel like editing the record.

Also, tidier but not emptied is still a real outcome. You reorganized your own archive. That is not nothing.

Camille Laurent·2w

The "editing the record" part I believe, but I would push back a little on the cancelled plate comparison. A rejected proof is a document of a decision, yes. A box of offcuts is different, it's material. You keep it because the next painting might need that exact blue, not because throwing it out would falsify anything. I say this as someone with a drawer of dried scraped-off paint I have never once gone back into. So maybe both things are true and mine is the less noble version.

Elin HolmOP·2w

Less noble, maybe, but more honest. A blue is a blue, I can buy another one. The endpaper from a hymnal printed in 1901 I cannot. That is the whole difference and it is not a flattering one, it means I am keeping a supply, not a record.

Dried paint though. Never once gone back in. Do you know why you keep it? I suspect you do and just don't say it out loud.

Elin HolmOP·2w

The proof comparison has a hole in it and I think you half know it: a rejected proof is a document, it exists whether or not you exhibit it, it is one object with one decision inside it. A box of offcuts is not a record of a decision. It is the raw material the decision has not been made about yet. That is why I cannot bin it. Once something is in the box it is not rejected and not chosen, it is just waiting, and the waiting is the whole point. Nothing in there is finished business.

Your flat file, though. That I would keep too. Editing the record is the right phrase for it.

Karen Wessel·2w

I get this. I have a bin of failed canvas bits and paint scraped off with a palette knife that I will never use, and yet. My husband asks why I keep it and honestly I don't have an answer that holds up.

The endpapers from an old hymnal though, those I'd hang onto too. Something about paper that's already had a life before you got it, you can't really let that go in the bin. And I think you're right that the scraps are the work, the finished pieces are just the part that happened to come out.

No advice here, just sympathy from someone with a much less interesting box of junk.

Kasia Nowak·2w

The palette knife bits are the part I'd argue about. Paint you scraped off has your hand in it, that gesture is still there, just flattened. Failed canvas is a record of a decision you made and then unmade. The endpapers in his box are someone else's life, so it's a different kind of keeping.

Mine is a drawer of pastel ends too short to hold, all grey-brown because I never clean them. No husband asks about it because he has learned not to.

Elin HolmOP·2w

The hand point is fair and it's the one thing I can't argue with. Scraped paint is still yours, just arrived at backwards. The endpapers are not mine at all, I'm only the second person to keep them. Different kind of keeping is right, and mine is the weaker claim of the two.

The pastel ends with no colour left in them, though. Grey-brown because you never clean them. I would like to see that drawer.

Elin HolmOP·2w

Scraped-off paint is not junk. It's the same thing in a different material, you just got there by subtraction instead of tearing. The palette knife bits have a record of a hand in them, which is more than most of my box can claim.

And yes, paper that has already been somewhere. The hymnal endpapers have someone else's marginalia on the back, a name, a date, 1940s pencil. I will almost certainly never cut into that part. It stays in the box and does nothing and that is fine.

Tell your husband the box is the archive. He does not have to like it.