Lighten the Load

What's in your wallet?

Oct 12, 2025

[This week, I’m traveling and won’t have time to write a new column, so forgive me! But here’s a useful one from the past. I’ll return to writing new columns soon.]

In my plein air painting workshops, it’s gotten to be an in-joke. When someone announces, usually with regret, that he’d forgotten to bring a particular tube of paint or a certain brush, the sympathetic response from the group is: “Hey, it’s okay—every ounce counts.” The idea being that, as plein air painters, we try to lighten our load—even though we may sometimes forget an important item.

Our gear and materials can be heavy, and the ounces do add up. Whether you’re toting everything in a rolling cart, a boat bag or, as I do, a backpack, one more tube of paint can be the difference between comfort and pain. Hikers and backpackers will be familiar with this concept.

For many years, I taught many back-to-back workshops. My pack, which contained not just things to paint with but a few things to teach with, accompanied me to each location. A couple of times a year, I’d pull a tiny muscle in my back, and the pain would be bad enough to put me in bed for a few days—unless, of course, I was teaching, in which case I just had to slog on, popping ibuprofen. One year, I hurt my back very badly, and I didn’t have time to rest it properly. Consequently, I just injured it more, and I was in agony.

Maybe I’m a bit slow, because I didn’t connect the back pain to the backpack until COVID. When the pandemic hit, the in-person workshops stopped. The backpack stayed in the closet. For my personal painting expeditions, I started taking a light shoulder bag, just big enough to hold my very minimal gouache kit. One day, I realized I hadn’t had any back problems since I stopped carrying the backpack.

Out of curiosity, I thought I’d weigh the various things I typically stuff in my pack, using a postal scale. Also, because I use a variety of surfaces for oil painting, I thought I’d weigh a few of those, too, since some surfaces seemed heavier than others. You can find my list of all this below.