Coloured Mud

Not once in art school did a teacher pull me aside and ask “how do you like spending entire days alone?” Of course, the single minded energy that flowed through my every pore at age 20 would have erupted forth with an unthinking “I can handle anything” to any suggestion that being alone even registered as an issue. In school, you are also surrounded by like minded peers and the word community seemed an obvious byproduct of this making art thing. Now you sit, 15 years removed from those idyllic days and you can count on one hand the number of people you’ve actually spoken with in the past few days, let alone seen! Strangely enough, isolation is perhaps the most valuable and difficult commodity to manage in the game of art making. It’s you and your work dancing together and depending on the dance other people may simply get in the way. Now I don’t want to pretend that artists have a monopoly on isolation in their profession; writers…um, writers would also seem to need solitude. Late night security? What else? I don’t know. What I do know is that the same 20 year old surety that could bulldoze through most any circumstance has been replaced by a more sensitive 30 something year old who is affected by isolation in many more ways than before.

I bring this topic up in part because after nearly 10 years of working in my own studio spaces without studio mates or interruption I am joining a group of three other artists in moving into a much larger communal space for our studios. I’m tired of being alone and relish the chance to drive a wedge into the circular habits of a decade long working process. The benefits of isolation have been played out for me.

What are those benefits? Why would you want to be alone almost all the time? For one, making art takes a lot of time and energy. Dealing with other people also takes time and energy. The two don’t always work together. It’s no secret that most of us who work at something need alone or distraction free time to accomplish certain tasks. We have a task, we do it and we move onto the next one. In art making, the difficulty is that many tasks such as putting paint on a canvas don’t have an easily definable outcome. This is part of the “magic” of art in that the goals artists want are defined as best as he or she can and then you work to get as close as you can to those goals and some new middle ground between idea and execution is reached. There are few quantifiable steps that map out the direct path you need to follow for success. As such, you need to really pay attention with all of your faculties when working in order to achieve that close proximity to your goal. It can be exhausting and any distractions can undermine that exchange between you and your artwork. There are certainly times when you can turn on an autopilot and cruise through the process but autopilot only repeats what has happened before and the greatness in art happens in that delicate region when uncertainty and risk meets discovery. When you are alone, you can manage that delicate balance with your full energy undeterred by any outside influence. It’s seductive to be in “the zone” and is one of the main ingredients in a desire to isolate in studio.

What drawbacks? For one, you often don’t even realize your autopilot has inadvertently gotten switched on and has you working in a circular holding pattern for days on end. Without another voice in the room you can quickly surrender to your old working habits while thinking you are making great strides forward. Efficiency is not an easy word to bring into the organic process of art making and when you are uninfluenced in your own working structure it can slowly migrate to tedium and inefficiency. Once you start down the path of poor working habits it becomes a self perpetuating prophecy because change is difficult at best and in isolation it’s doubly difficult. In addition, the delicate balance of uncertainty, risk and discovery can seem horribly heavy when you face it by yourself. Is it really so difficult? No, but when you are alone and spending your time on singular tasks (like making a painting) you inevitably put too much value on the task at hand because there is nothing else to balance it out. Things can get too serious and stagnate. Humor is helpful, but jokes told in solitude aren’t all that funny. When I was 20-something, adrenaline and coffee were all I needed to survive those weight filled days. Isolation balanced with coffee and Van Halen might work for a short while but as a long term approach won’t win any awards in the list of successful attributes for the successful artist.

Isolation does become a great benefit when an outside goal like a show or an application looms. You need to get something done and you need the distraction free time to do it and you work. Great! What do you do when you are faced with an empty schedule, zero deadlines and the weight of that isolation becomes enormous? This is what I am facing now. With the last round of grants and fellowships sounding back with a resounding thud and no large shows scheduled and my teaching on hold until February, I find myself stuck in a vacuum of isolation. Probably the single most important task ahead of me is deciding what path to follow next in marketing my art. Go more commercial (ie – solicit commercial galleries) or go more on my own (ie – sell the work myself and through less commercial venues.) I have been on a path more of my own making for nearly ten years and I am at the crossroads of either rededicating or reevaluating. That circular holding pattern fostered by isolation has me feeling frozen to take that next step. I am moving into a new studio in two weeks so steps are being taken but in the meanwhile I don’t know if I’m up or down. This is perhaps the most difficult issue to balance in an art career; you need the isolation and the singular focus and belief to accomplish making the art but the psychological effect of that singularly driven attitude is incredibly difficult to change even when change is needed. My muscle memory screams to continue down the same path despite knowing a different direction will be more prosperous. The devil you know seems better than the one you don’t…

In a way, I’m reminded back when I was a small kid playing hide and seek with an adult. You are so sure when you’re hidden that if you hold your breath and don’t move there is no way you will be found. Secretly, you want to be found and you know that you eventually will but you persist in making yourself as invisible as possible even as you are filled with the anticipation of discovery. Waiting for change in isolation feels a bit like this except the anticipation is more akin to fear. I feel like I am holding my breath and the isolation makes the struggle all the more intense. It’s not the being alone that is necessarily difficult it’s how that isolation clouds your perception of the world. Things seem bigger and more / too important without the benefit of another voice in the room saying “chill out” (the voices in your head don’t count.) I was half kidding earlier about humor helping but it really does. When you’re alone, things just aren’t that funny. When you’re with someone, they are. In the arts, seriousness pervades everything we do and that’s not always for the better. A few jokes, especially at your own expense are infinitely more desirable than no jokes at all.

Modigliani walks into a bar and the barkeep says, “Why the long face?”