I can't tell you how many shows/opportunities that I have applied for with the requirement -"work made in the last two years." I once overheard a professor complaining about this overarching tendency for galleries to require this claiming, "my work doesn't expire." I guess that's true and I guess I feel the same way most of the time. But maybe it does a bit. Of course we are talking about two different things here, really. Galleries tend to have this requirement for completely different reasons than a freshness stamp. It has more to do with not wanting to show work in their gallery that has been shown allover the US for the last 10 years. Its an attempt to keep the work shown in a gallery new and well, fresh. Gallerists may disagree with me here but I think if you have a work that is 3 years old but you haven't shown it anywhere - you have a couple of years of showing that thing.
With my own work, I do feel a pressure to stop showing things that have been hanging around for 4 or 5 years. Its tough, because once a work doesn't sell and then you also decide to stop showing it, it just goes where paintings go to die - storage. The next step is getting unrolled (if its a canvas) and then the chances of the world ever getting to see it is mostly gone, gone, gone. I actually and quite literally just cut a 10 year old painting made on a panel into little rectangles to fill in holes in an old house I am remodeling. I have table in my shed who's table top is a 13 year old painting. Sometimes a retired painting is a re purposed painting. I actually don't have the sentimental attachment to my work that I see in others. I have a file on my computer for retired images they are even in digital storage.
The above painting is one that I still have, it is quite large (72 x 48), it is on panel (so it can't be rolled) and has been in storage for a couple of years. I certainly wouldn't say it is "expired" but it is less connected to the more recent cow paintings and just doesn't fit as well for me. It never sold, probably because of the disgusting udder. When I look at this image, what I see is another step in a conversation that I have been having with the viewers of my work for more than a decade. There is strong connection from the udder to the meat pods that I am painting currently.
My goal has always been to capture some nugget of a universal human quality within my painting. Sometimes it does happen and other times the viewer is going to have to work a little harder. I think the things we struggle with now are the things we have always struggled with. Twas ever thus. I do think that there are elements within my work that have a shelf life and those are things that probably didn't have that much resonance to begin with, discarded symbols, cliches and so on. Ultimately though the truths that you find within the work is true now and will be true later. There is a reason why an overwhelming majority of painting students (from my experience) look at Rembrandt. Rembrandt painted truth and conveyed the long survey of human experience through faces, eyes and a light that seems to burn from within the painting - brought by the viewer.
