The art of downshifting – finding freedom with the simple life

Art supplies are horribly expensive. I suspect that the manufacturers of paints, pencils, inks etc believe that all artists are secretly making shedloads of money and only look shabby and live in garrets because they’re, you know, artists.

Here’s what you do if you want to make lots of money. Buy an ordinary, cheap, plastic toolbox, stencil the word ‘ArtBin’ on the side and pretend that the compartments sized to take screwdrivers and chisels are actually designed for pencils and brushes. Now sell it for four times the price you paid. (I actually have an ArtBin, bought when I was younger, had more money and was even more stupid.)

Now here’s what you do if you want to save money – especially if you’re a printmaker. Head over to the New Directions in Printmaking blog where Nik Semenoff will tell you how to use everyday materials in your work. It’ll save you a fortune, compared to buying fancy-labelled ‘art’ supplies, and it will open your eyes to new techniques and possibilities.

Even if you’re not into printmaking, take a look anyway. It may give you a new perspective on what materials you might consider suitable for making art.

It’s not a new idea, but it’s one that needs reviving. Instead of going shopping when you feel like some new clothes, music or DVDs, why not ask your friends if they’ve got anything to give away?

Here in the depths of the French countryside, retail therapy isn’t really an option. Instead, when the acquisitive itch gets too strong, we get together and share.

Everyone we know has something they no longer need or want – something that is perfectly functional and too good to throw away, but is currently just gathering dust.

The idea of swap parties is catching on among trendy young women in the UK, I understand. But we’ve been doing it for years.

In France, they call it a bourse. It means ‘purse’ (in the British sense – ‘pocketbook’ to Americans), but the word is also used in the context of ‘exchange’ or ‘market’. The Bourse is the French stock exchange, and there are frequent ‘bourse des plantes’ or ‘bourse des vêtements’ events, which range from small, one-off markets to the equivalent of bring-and-buy sales.

In our case, bourses are even more casual affairs. We invite a bunch of friends to the house. Everyone brings stuff that’s cluttering their houses. It’s all laid out on tables and the floor and people help themselves. No money changes hands: it’s not about making cash.

Being friends – and being, mostly, British – we’re all terribly polite about it. There’s never any argument about who gets what. Most of the bourses take place during a Girls’ Night In, when all the wives and girlfriends get together to eat chocolate, drink and scream (at least, that’s what it sounds like from my hiding place in the office). Trish has described just such an evening here. It seems they spend half their time picking clothes for each other.

It’s perfect whichever way you look at it. You get something new. You get to rid yourself of some clutter. Objects get recycled in the best possible way – by simply extending their useful lives. And you get a good evening with friends into the bargain.

The DH and I were having another one of those discussions over the weekend – how to reduce our bills and at the same time go more eco-friendly.

We are all for being green, as I’m sure most people are, but the primary push is probably going to be forced on all of us. For instance, we stopped using our tumble dryer a year ago in order to reduce our electricity bill, and for the same reason, we now wash up by hand rather than using the dishwasher. (In any case, it broke, and the part was a fortune, and we can’t afford a new machine.) So back we are (or rather, the DH is) washing up with a bowl and soapy water. It is not so bad, really, and at least enables us to use our nice raku dinnerware, which was too delicate for the machine.

A bunch of us girlfriends also wanted to try soap nuts, so we split a 20-euro bag between four of us (giving each of us enough nuts for six months). The verdict so far is pretty positive – the soap nuts seem to get your clothes as clean as old-style washing powders or liquids, and leave no residue in your clothes to irritate sensitive skin. The only drawback is that the clothes don’t smell fresh. They don’t smell dirty either, of course, they just don’t smell at all. Perhaps this is something we’ll all get used to – you can put a few drops of essential oil in the dispenser if you want, but I don’t like to do it too often because we have a septic tank.

Another thing that’s on our minds is lighting, because the old-style incandescent lightbulbs are being phased out now, and that will mean switching over to energy-saving bulbs, like it or not. Which is fine, even though they’re three times the price, because they last virtually forever and they use, say, 11 watts of electricity instead of 60, which will mean a massive reduction in consumption. But in our case, it also remains replacing all our light fittings, because our current ones won’t take eco-friendly bulbs.

We have a dimmer switch for the main lights, and that’s a no-no for energy-saving bulbs, so it will have to come out. This house is also French but the people who restored it from a ruin were British and they brought over British fixtures with them – crucially, these take bayonet-fitting bulbs. Try getting those in France. It’s hard enough to get incandescent ones, but in long-life, it’s virtually impossible. So every British light fitting in the house will have to come out and be replaced with a French one – that’s 14 fittings.

Oh la. It can’t be helped. It is what we call the Montcocher effect – we try to do the simplest thing, like put up a shelf, and it entails some massive palaver with drills and rawlplugs and special screws and I know not what. But once again, when it’s done, it will be done, and I’m sure we’ll be glad of it.