[A] real artist is conscious of having a personal singularity that is partly a blessing and partly a curse. An artist enjoys and suffers from isolation. As solitude, isolation can nurture. It can also destroy.
— Peter Schjeldahl, “Why Artists Make the Worst Students,” originally in Chronicle of Higher Education.
I can’t say I agree with everything asserted in the speech I’ve excerpted here. And I wasn’t thinking of Peter Schjeldahl when I closed my studio door one winter day in my final semester of graduate school.
But somehow, upon discovering these particular lines, I began to realize more fully the significance of that very ordinary act of self-separation.
I’m a visual artist. Painting, mostly. After majoring in art at a liberal arts university and working for a few years, I felt ready to take my art education to the next level by pursuing a Master of Fine Arts degree.
Graduate school was a revelation to me. It was both challenging and wonderful in ways I had never expected.
My studio space was one of the more wonderful aspects. In my program, most of us were lucky enough to have real rooms, with walls that went all the way up to the ceiling and doors that could be closed and locked. It was a sanctuary, completely under my control, a space that belonged, for two years anyway, exclusively to me.
At first, this was strangely daunting. For more than a year, I kept my door open whenever I was working. I felt less isolated. Keeping my door open was also a way of opening myself to the newfound experience of participating in a true artists’ community. I wanted to invite that communal feeling in, to embrace it bodily, to immerse myself in it.
As we began the fourth and final semester of our MFA program, my classmates and I were in the throes of intense preparation for our thesis exhibitions. In many ways, the thesis exhibition was the culmination of the art graduate school experience. Of course, like any climax, it was tangled up in enough conflicting emotions and stresses to rattle the most grounded of students. None of us were immune, and we each had to invent more or less successful ways to deal with the temporary insanity.
My magic bullet turned out to be closing my studio door.
After months of maintaining a true open-door policy, I finally took full advantage of the sacred space I had been given. I withdrew tentatively at first, keeping the door propped open a crack. For the fresh air, I told myself. To regulate the temperature. I need good air circulation, right? Right?
The full commitment came almost by accident. One day, I just closed the door without thinking about it, and suddenly…
There I was, alone at last with my paintings. Alone, yes. But I realized I was decidedly not lonely. I found the closed studio not claustrophobic or depressing, but rather comforting, even exciting.
I became addicted to the solitude, to the privacy. As my exhibition drew nearer and my work gained momentum, I put up more buffers between my studio and the rest of my world. I turned off my cell phone whenever I was working. I cut faculty studio visits to the bare minimum and stopped inviting my peers in altogether. I even arranged things so that, if I did open the door, passersby could see nothing of my current work.
In creating this fortress, this sacred chamber, I felt strangely liberated. I found it easier to take risks and experiment. I realized that my best work was happening when I was free not only from critical eyes and comments, but also from well-meaning ones. The decisions and judgments were wholly my own, between me and my paintings, without intervention of any kind. I was rewarded with a series of pieces that were risky and a bit scary to make, let alone show to anyone, but were completely and totally made on my own terms.
I now acknowledge that the work I have chosen to do is fundamentally solitary. But Peter Schjeldahl points out the dichotomy in the level of separation many artists require. Isolation certainly has its perils. A good critique from a fresh and trusted pair of eyes is often the key to breaking out of a difficult block or rut. Consider also Balzac’s cautionary tale, “The Unknown Masterpiece,” in which an artist isolates himself so completely and becomes so driven by his painting that he eventually creates something whose genius only he can see. This prospect is downright terrifying to someone who believes in art as an act of communication, by definition incomplete unless connection is made with an audience.
I recently learned that even the word “solitude” has a double-edged etymology. Its near-cognate Latin root, solitudo, can mean not only “solitude”, but also “loneliness”, “deprivation”, and “wilderness”. It has even been translated as “wasteland”. I know I’ve encountered all of these in the privacy of my current studio — a different room now, but still in a building full of working artists, still with walls all the way up to the ceiling, and a door that locks.
And though I keep that door open quite a bit, there comes a moment in the creation of every painting, or at least every painting I love, when I urgently need to brave the wilderness, risk the loneliness, and embrace the solitude of my personal creation space. That’s when I close my door these days. And it’s worth it every time.
