Q: I've been painting and sculpting for about twenty years and am pretty popular in my part of the state. I'm quite prolific, have sold hundreds of pieces of art, and have hundreds more in storage at my house and in my studio. The bad news is that I'm kind of a pack rat and my wife has given me an ultimatum. She wants me to clean out the house and studio and get rid of whatever I think I can live without including personal possessions and excess pieces of my art. I'm thinking that I'll probably get rid of a lot of older stuff that I made when I was younger-- pieces I don't really care about that much anymore. Maybe I'll take them to a flea market and sell them for whatever I can get. What do you think?

A: This is a horrible idea. Do whatever you have to do in order to avoid selling even a single piece of your art at give away prices or, worse yet, throwing it out. Go ahead and get rid of any personal possessions that you don't really need, but start getting rid of your art and, in the end, you'll regret it. Your art will eventually become your personal retirement account and pension fund and throwing it away now or selling it for next to nothing is tantamount to throwing money into a trash can.

To begin with, you're considering selling or throwing out earlier works. For your information, experienced art collectors often tend to value and pay premium prices for earlier works rather than later ones. Any art dealer will tell you that once an artist has developed a mature style, a good reputation, and is established in his or her career, earlier works become increasingly significant because they most clearly demonstrate how that mature style evolved. Earlier pieces are often original, energetic, dramatic, risky, experimental, emotionally charged, and, most importantly, they document artists' "growing pains." Later pieces, on the other hand, generally exhibit fewer such characteristics as the artists by then know the directions of their careers and are settled into more comfortable production patterns.

How your work progresses and evolves over the years is an essential aspect of your artistic life. Your development as an artist is illustrated through changes in your art and is important to dealers, collectors, curators, historians, scholars and anyone else who's a fan of your work. As you get older, you'll come to understand that possessing evidence of every stage of your artistic evolution-- namely pieces of art from all time periods in your career-- becomes increasingly important. The better known you get, the greater the number of people who are attracted to your art, and the wider the range of your art that they're interested in.

You'll see that not everyone will always want to own only your latest creations, especially as you advance in your career. Early and mid-career artists commonly make the mistake of believing that the art they're now making is all that matters, all that their collectors care about or should care about, and that earlier works are basically irrelevant. In reality, the early work often becomes more relevant than the current work, not only because it possesses those characteristics mentioned above, but also because it exists in increasingly limited quantities and unlike current work, once it's sold, it can no longer be replaced or reproduced. No matter how involved you are with your current work, never lose sight of the big picture, that is, the totality of your career.

As for the financial benefits of saving your art, look at the lives of successful artists and you'll see that those who set aside the greatest numbers of early works also have the greatest number of options in later life. Andy Warhol, for example, saved enough art for his beneficiaries to create an entire museum in his name. Other successful artists have used their art to establish foundations, as inheritances for their descendants, or as tax deductible donations to museums. Many artists simply use the proceeds from the sales of saved works to support themselves after they retire and stop making art.

In case you can't work things out with your wife and some art has to go, here are several suggestions:

* Whatever happens, separate out and keep your best early pieces.

* If you can't afford to pay for storage, ask friends, relatives, or collectors whether they'd like to display pieces in their homes or offices at no charge.

* Ask people with storage space whether they'd be willing to store your art at no charge (or in exchange for a piece or two of your art).

* Ask dealers or galleries that represent you whether they'd be interested in taking additional pieces on consignment including your earlier work (some might like it).