I’ve recently begun
work again in studio. Throughout my life, I’ve felt art-identified. By that I
mean I’ve accepted myself as a working person in art, having had a respectable
number of art shows and performances after going to university to study art
history, art theory and the making of art in studio. I suppose I could say I’ve
been writing most of my life as well, though until about the mid-1980s I’ve
been pretty much a journal stream-of-thought writer. Don’t know if this counts,
but in first grade I wrote a poem about a bird in a tree (one that didn’t
rhyme—never liked that much unless it is one with the smarts of Auden’s The More Loving One). I still have my
poem somewhere—my mother sent it to me as a keepsake along with a handkerchief
I’d stitched haphazardly on the sewing machine at age three. I wrote this poem in
first or second grade on a Big Chief writing tablet, the pulp of the paper so
raw that my brother used to laugh and say his pencil kept bumping into slivers
of wood as he attempted to do his lettering in class. The poem wasn’t more than
eight or ten words long but the entire page was filled with a colored drawing
of the tree with the bird on a branch. So it’s hard to say which medium held my
greater attention, even back then.
I have a lovely
studio, upstairs in a renovated quasi-Victorian farmhouse that covers at least
the length of half the house, but lately it’s become a catch-all for anything I
don’t want in the places where I live and visit with friends. Last week, after
giving my latest novel to my editor for cutting and revisions, I went into my
studio and sat wondering what in the world had become of who I thought I was
most of my adult life. Had I become so self-identified (there’s that word again)
with artmaking that I didn’t need it anymore? Had I lost all perspective about
what it takes to really “do art,” the notion that you have to be in studio
regularly, if not daily, to meet the problems in the work in order to move
forward? Well, obviously I haven’t been going anywhere in that arena for a good
long while. But why is that?
Art is a very
physical, I tell my friends by way of defense. It’s not simply the demands of
the making—which sometimes can be overwhelming, especially as the old bones and
muscles complain—but in the sheer storage of what’s made. I’ve stuffed every
closet around, over and under my clothes and all the side walls and niches in
studio with framed works not sold, of course, not sold, and most walls covered with the stuff—mine and other
artists. I know artist friends who actually filled barns with their work,
surrendering it finally to the drafts, moisture, drought, bugs and vermin because
storage in temperature-controlled environments cost a fortune and if one is
steadily working, the spaces are continually filled so are never enough.
Notice I’ve said
nothing about sculpture. That’s because I started lopping this off the media
list before the two-dimensional work, which seemed easier to manage. I called a
junkman to come and take half the basement full of sculptures and potential sculptures away in his dump
truck. The first time he came, I stood making decisions about what would stay
or go. The second time, I waved my hands about the space and left for the day!
So over time, the
artworks became smaller, and God help me, narrower in both scope and content.
Finally, well, in those final days, I worked on nothing larger than 11”x14” Strathmore
(student grade) with a few larger sheets of handmade paper screaming at me from
the back of storage cabinets. More finally still, I closed the door on the whole
enterprise, but continued to pay for cable service in there in case I decided
to go back and work while baseball season was on!
As you will see
from the essays that follow, I’m inching my way back to that original self-identifying
way of life again. Believe me, writing has its own problems with computer
glitches and know-how and with cabinets for notes and a few hard copies of published
works, but it doesn’t demand barns for storage with Carbonite and cyberspace
literally closets in the air. Truly, there’s great appeal in that.
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