How to Store a Painting in Arizona

Almost every painting that gets damaged in Arizona is damaged in storage, not on a wall. The wall is usually fine. It is the six months in the garage that does it.

Putting one away properly takes about ten minutes and costs almost nothing, so here is the whole thing.

Not the garage, and not the attic

We run about 111 days a year at or above 100 degrees, and a closed garage sits well above whatever it is doing outside. An attic is worse.

Heat does not fade a painting the way sunlight does. What it does is speed up every chemical reaction already happening quietly inside the materials. Binders stiffen faster, varnish yellows faster, a flexible surface turns brittle sooner. A summer in a garage is not one bad afternoon, it is several years of aging handed over at once.

If a piece matters to you at all, it does not go out there. If you stop reading here, that is the part worth keeping.

Where it should go instead

Anywhere the air conditioning reaches. An interior closet, a spare room, the space under a bed. None of that is glamorous and all of it works.

Steady matters more than perfect. A room that sits at a boring 78 degrees all year is kinder to a painting than a room that swings, because it is the swinging that loosens and tightens a canvas until something gives. You are not trying to build a vault. You are trying to avoid a rollercoaster.

Stand it up

Vertical, on its edge, leaning back very slightly against a wall. Never flat, and never stacked face down under other things.

A canvas lying flat under weight for months will slowly take on the shape of whatever is pressing into it, including its own stretcher bars. You get faint lines showing through the front, and they do not come out.

Get it off the floor as well. A couple of scraps of wood, a folded rug, a stack of books, anything. Concrete is the coldest surface in the room and it pulls moisture from the air straight up into whatever is touching it.

What to wrap it in, and what to never wrap it in

Never put plastic directly against the surface of a painting. That is the one I would tattoo on people.

Plastic traps moisture against the paint, and in a warm room the surface can soften just enough to bond to it. People unwrap something a year later and find the plastic has taken a little of the painting with it. It is heartbreaking and it is completely avoidable.

The order that works: glassine or acid free tissue against the surface first, then a moving blanket or a clean cotton sheet over that, then cardboard on the corners if you have it. Glassine costs a few dollars at any art supply shop and it is the cheapest insurance you will ever buy.

If you genuinely need plastic for a move, it goes on the outside over the blanket, and it comes off the moment the painting is indoors.

A word about storage units

Climate controlled means different things to different companies, so ask for the actual numbers rather than the phrase.

Plenty of units here are cooled only into the eighties through summer, which a painting will survive but will not enjoy, and a good number are not managing humidity at all. If what you are storing is a piece you care about, a spare bedroom in a normal air conditioned house beats almost any unit you can rent.

Look at it twice a year

October, once the monsoon humidity has gone, and again in April before it gets hot. Unwrap it, stand it in decent light, and actually look.

You are checking for three things: a canvas that has gone slack, any lifting or flaking at the edges and corners, and anything sticking to the wrapping.

If the canvas is loose, leave it alone. Do not tighten the stretcher keys while the air is dry, because when the moisture comes back next July that canvas will pull far harder than it was ever built to, and that is one of the most common ways a perfectly healthy painting ends up cracked. It is always done with good intentions.

The short version

Inside the conditioned part of the house. Standing up, off the floor. Glassine first, blanket second, plastic never against the surface. Look at it in October and April.

That is genuinely all of it. If you are storing something of mine and you are not sure about it, write to me and send a photograph. I would much rather look at it and tell you it is fine than have you worry until spring.

And if you would like to see new work as it is finished, the Collector's Circle always sees everything first.

Warmly,

Dani