Love of a ‘perfect storm’ studio.
An art studio is one of the most beautiful chaos chambers conducting our struggles and strivings in an increasingly complicated world. This sensation may well envelop a lot of different environments but none as close to the modern mind as this kind of beautiful mess.
Walking into my studio with coffee or tea, scruffy or clean from a good night sleep or an evening of racing thoughts and insomnia is a real and physical relief. After any number of things that just didn’t go right in the world out there, I step through an invisible shield of all protecting wonder.
The marvelous mess of the place somehow puts me at ease. Sitting back to enjoy the solitude, staring out at the work I have unfinished and letting some music or streaming media spill out over the walls and onto the floor, I can let my mind begin to solve the problems that I left the night before.
Certainties & the Meta-state
In here I’m alone but somehow connected to everything by a set of strong certainties known through success after failure. Perhaps it’s a beta-wave or meta state we’re able to get into when past experience holds us up.
Its an active meditation where we can pick up the torch of helping humanity persevere and strive to join the great contributors throughout history. It’s a gamble in grandeur that I have to realize is stacked against me.
Nevertheless, it’s the only calling that lifts me up and asks the impossible, challenging me to be humbled by the almost certain future of coming nowhere close to victory yet feeling the winds of destiny urge me forward regardless. When an artist aims high, they know the risks.
Here in my studio I’m given plenty of oxygen for the fire and a little less gravity by a sort of suspended-in-time sensation when the layers between space unravel to begin working and investigating the mystery itself. I can travel a great distance, similar to those moments before and after sleep and solve problems quickly even without knowing the particular points along the way. A sort of Merlin’s law, working backwards from a goal to where you are.
Caldron & Cacophony
At this time, creativity has to break the cacophony of an active mind in order to capture my full attention. The artwork chooses me as much as I choose it.
Mixing out a palette from a fresh supply of materials satisfies almost every part of me. It’s a uniquely exciting moment. It’s where the unknown meets thousands of years of experience, desire, love and fear.
I begin to turn in a caldron of ancient knowledge and even further back in the chemical race of primitive emotions, all competing and completing each other with the modern hierarchy of living requirements and taken-for-granite luxuries. A mess like this and a studio to match.
Eclectic Facets of Being
I love the smell of the oil and varnish, the stone dust and wood. The stacks of drawings and unfinished concepts. The piles of notebooks filled with attempts at an autobiography, poems and daily lists.
The eclectic materials that continue to grow and gather into work zones and microcosms of exploration. Its no wonder I’m more comfortable in my studio than in the world out there. I only know who I am when I’ve uncovered something in the art, revealing another facet of my being.
A friend once told me that every artist needs their ‘fortress of solitude’, though at the time I was infatuated with the idea of an old bohemian lifestyle and wanted the chaos and community of an artistic beehive of activity. Of being all together in our struggles and striving for any recognition at all.
I’ve changed over the years to a more suspicious observer after a good deal of failures in the hungry wolf pack of ambition. Though I know I am apart of that and always will be. I know how important it is to have a group of your contemporaries and still maintain control over your own space and direction.
It represents the interior realm you are constructing, your oasis in the desert of desperation where opportunities lay shrouded in mysteries you don’t even know the names of.
Slow Motion Fire
A studio is a launch pad that rockets you into the fourth dimension as well as the quantum level of investigation. The micro moments that burn in a slow-motion fire fuels every life lived with passion.
We know only what we’ve seen though we can intuit the unknown in these moments. The pursuit itself holds our attention. It takes time to reach levels of this nature and the right space to nurture the evolution. I live for my studio where ever it happens to be.
It’s here that I join the conversation of a progressive innovation. It’s where a nebulous of spiraling elements collide to form an observable universe. Its where I know myself and learn to understand others as the particles collide and I collect the data.
It’s worth my every breath and thought to explore. The studio with over-hanging light, concrete floors and open sky lights. An eager public growing to have a glimpse and the soiree’s that show the them what is happening in the midst of creative prolificacy. The fortress of solitude that magnifies all things under the microscopic eye and connects to the river of humanity like an old roman road in a conquered world.
L.c.Lamar