Vermont Studio Center residency – Part I

Have you ever had the luxury of being able to do pretty much whatever you want, all day and every day, with no demands or interruptions whatsoever? Well, I myself have not, but for an artist, this is about as close as it gets. A huge studio, 3 great meals a day prepared by other people, and the ability to come and go as you please without worrying about the time of day all combine to make this an incredible environment for creativity and productivity.

One of the VSC co-founders, Jon Gregg, stood up during dinner the first night to welcome all the new residents and had some advice for us. I’m paraphrasing a bit here, but he basically said, “All you people (artists and writers) have come here and have put all kinds of pressure on yourself about what you’re going to do while you’re here. Well, there are 7 billion people in the world, many of them just struggling to survive, and when you think about that, you realize that no one cares.” Way to put things in perspective! We were thus freed from the self-imposed responsibility to do great things.

Why then, did it take me so long to get into the groove? Having brought a great variety of materials and supplies, I was at first in a quandary as to what to make. I guess it’s that idea again that constraints and limits are, paradoxically, rather freeing. Also, the working environment here took some getting used to for me. There are lots of people in this particular studio building, and the walls are thin. So we all have to be really quiet. Everyone goes into their studio and closes the door, and we’re all very hush-hush. You can hear people walking around because the floors creak, and sometimes there are tiny scratching sounds when people are drawing or painting. The rest of the sounds are intermittent, as people go in and out, drag their chairs across the floor, hammer on things, or use hair dryers, etc. I need to have something to listen to in order to engage my left brain while I’m working on art, but I hate in-the-ear headphones, and that’s all I have. So I’m still getting used to that.

And most importantly, I’ve never been to New England before, much less in the fall, so I had to spend some time just taking in the glorious scenery.

 

Once that’s out of the way, how to proceed? First, get everything hauled into the studio and get set up. Spend some time thinking about where to put things. Ponder. Look out the window at the fall foliage and the gorgeous rusty rooftops of the structures next door. Ponder some more.

 

There is a wonderful art supply store here, so the next order of business was to have a look there. I found some inexpensive large rolls of paper and a variety of new pens and other marking tools to experiment with. Whenever I feel stuck in the studio, I have to trick myself by just playing around for awhile to get around that mindset of taking myself too seriously. I decided to put up some  big pieces of paper and just see what I might do with those.

Here I’m just testing the waters and trying to think a little differently. I don’t normal draw on paper. The piece to the right is one of the treasures I found on one of my walks.

 

More work in progress. Playing with some black marking tools, which turned out to be water soluble and smear when you paint over them. Kind of fun and uncontrollable.

Then, since I’d brought my portable sewing machine, I had to make sure I used it for something. I played with repurposing some cast-off strips from prior work.

 

Then I started making some more of my stitched paper pieces that I’m calling “Excavations.”  I first wrote about these here. I was rather nervous about doing this at first, because the stitching on paper is super loud, but I asked the people around me about it and they all assured me it wasn’t bothering them. I told them to pound on the wall if they needed me to knock it off, but so far it’s been OK. I have a lot more to say about the excavations pieces because working on them here has helped me clarify my thoughts about them, but this post is already getting rather long, so I’ll save that for another day.

Here’s how the studio looked after two weeks.

Limited progress on this one. More found treasures at right.