Boldness + Risk-Taking

At the end of December each year, I choose a word to focus on for the coming year. The word I chose this year is bold. It came to me while I was working in the studio experimenting with colors I don’t ordinarily use and wrestling with how to continue making work that looks and feels like my own while mixing things up and keeping it fresh. For me, that means bringing in elements that are round to counter my penchant for ordered squares. It means letting my paintings get wild before I rush in to quiet them. It means getting messy when I prefer things neat and tidy - mise en place.

Sometimes what we need to balance us is a little bit of our opposite. This is not a comfortable experience. It actually means getting profoundly uncomfortable at times.

I am happy with how the painting above - Seerose - turned out, but let me tell you, it kicked about my studio for weeks stumping me. It was awkwardly bright and garish color-wise, and the shapes were disjointed and unrelated. I had a hard time looking at it; I turned it around a few times to face the wall. Periodically towards the end of a day of painting, I’d hoist it up onto my table and work on it and then hang it on the wall and step back to study what was emerging.

photo credit: Hannah Hoggatt

I had to hang in the unknown for much longer than usual. I had to let it get a bit ugly, if you will, before I worked to resolve it. Along the way, I talked myself through it. ‘This was just for me,’ I told myself. This was an experiment. No one ever needed to see this if I decided not to show it. I could always cover it up later.

Over the years as artists we gradually develop a higher tolerance for being uncomfortable in the studio, but it never gets easy. All the voices are there in our heads chattering away, threatening to tear down our hard won confidence.

A stubborn painting that makes us work, however, can be an excellent teacher, pointing out the edge of our knowing and showing us where we need to go next. I’ve written about the idea of “riding the wave” in the studio previously and it’s a good post to go back and read if you missed it or if you are in a bit of a slump at the moment. It can be helpful to know that you are not alone and in fact it’s all part of the process of being an artist.

photo credit: Hannah Hoggatt

If I’ve improved at one thing as a result of the many hours I’ve spent alone in my studio painting, it is getting better at managing the ups and downs of my painting practice, riding the proverbial waves, enjoying the highs, and taking the lows in stride. In choosing the word “bold” to characterize 2022, I gave myself permission to paint in a way that pushes my edge, to take bigger risks with color, to mix things up. It is what I know I need to move forward.

In addition to changing things up in the studio, I am working on developing some new workshop content. I had a wonderful time running a week-long residency for artists in 2021 and am putting together another immersive residency-style experience for artists in 2023.

In many ways our studio practice reflects our lives. What is your practice asking of you right now? Is there a way to bring in a small amount of something that is the opposite of your tendency or nature? What risks can you take in 2022 to move your practice forward? These are great questions to noodle on or journal about at the beginning of your studio day.

Retreat

I’ve been pondering the difference between a workshop and a retreat as I’m scheduling more of the latter and less of the former in 2022. A workshop is generally a fairly quick immersion into technique with opportunity to practice and study directly under an instructor whose teaching style and skill you admire.

A retreat, on the other hand, can be a number of different things, but one thing it most clearly affords is space and time for reflection. Technique and developing new skills may be part of it, but for me retreat has always emphasized taking time to myself to ponder, to think deeply, to try things that don’t necessarily move my work forward directly, but do so in a non-linear way and perhaps even more substantively as a result.

This coming year I will be co-teaching with my friend Lorraine Glessner again in Vermont at Lareau Farm and Inn. Lorraine is a fabulous artist and teacher. Our retreat - “Exploring Landscape In Encaustic & The Mark” - was such a rich and rewarding experience last year and I am thrilled that we will be offering it again in 2022.

Breakfast at Lareau Farm and Inn is something to look forward to and savor.

While this retreat focuses on utilizing the natural luminosity, textural, and layering possibilities of encaustic, it also moves beyond painting to consider marks that can be found in nature and their relationship to memory, change, and time. Students will have time to experiment with a range of drawing materials to depict the spirit and essence of the land. Daily hikes exploring the rugged natural beauty of The Mad River Valley, along with journaling, meditation, morning yoga, readings, and expressive mark-making exercises, will provide the inspiration with which to develop ideas and provide areas of focus for series-based work, while also developing your personal artistic voice. Considerations of our body’s connection and its direct relationship to landscape will also be discussed. Optional individual critiques with both instructors will be offered to all participants.

Taking a class with Lorraine at Castle Hill in 2019 enabled me to explore mark making and line in a new way.

I had the opportunity to be a student in one of Lorraine’s workshops several years ago and was struck by how insightful and transformative her instruction and exercises were for my own painting practice. I returned to the studio feeling refreshed and curious about ways I might experiment and broaden my visual language.

Walks in the woods at Lareau made us all slow down and look deeply.

It’s not often that one finds an opportunity to attend an art retreat with two instructors and benefit from their individual ways of approaching technique. Co-teaching with Lorraine was everything I hoped it would be - our styles and personalities blended together effortlessly to provide a rich and multi-faceted space for students to learn.

An important piece of retreat for me is to be in a beautiful and inspiring space. Lareau Farm and Inn - home of American Flatbread - is a true working farm on 25 acres with pigs and chickens and flowers and vegetables. You can stroll through the gardens and steep your senses with smells and sights. Our meals each morning and afternoon utilized flowers and vegetables from the gardens and were skillfully prepared and delicious.

Student work from our 2021 retreat at Lareau Farm & Inn.

For me, going on retreat isn’t about producing a new body of work - it’s about producing a new body of ideas. It’s about resting and being taken care of, about being with others and making new friends, and it’s about connecting more deeply and intimately with myself and my art making practice.

The historic farmhouse where we shared meals together.

As a gift to our students, Lorraine and I are offering $100 off our 2022 retreat if you took a workshop with either of us this past year. This offer is good through December 17. Please mention which of us you studied with when registering. For more information, visit lorraineglessner.wordpress.com.

And if our retreat doesn’t work for you dates-wise, be sure to check out the other two retreats she is offering at Lareau this summer - one focused on photography and the figure with Leah MacDonald and one on plein air painting with Kelly Milukas.

Creating Space

Chatting with a group of fellow artists, I listened while they reflected on the past year and a half. Space was a recurring theme. Whether they had it, how they were using it or reclaiming it, what it meant. One spoke about making over her attic into a new studio for herself. Another told of how, after a month of staying away from her studio, she slowly began to go to return and work again. How for months it was just her there, no one else showing up to the building. I found myself wondering - What does it mean to make space for ourselves?

My first “studio” was a corner of the living room in our flat in San Francisco. I carved out space for myself, placing a desk, a stool, and a table lamp beside the alcove that housed our computer. I stacked old wood boxes to store my art supplies, which were considerably fewer in those days. It helped that I worked small. Occasionally one of our cats walked across my work surface, demanding attention and leaving stray hair behind. It wasn’t private, but it sufficed. I envied artists with professional industrial spaces and couldn’t imagine I’d ever get there.

When my partner and I moved to Maine in 2010, I rented a studio in a communal space that had low walls. Again, a lack of privacy, but it didn’t matter because I was mostly there on weekends as I worked full time. Only occasionally was another artist present, but she kept to herself.

Two 40” x 40” underpaintings in process.

For a time I shared a studio that was a bay in another artist’s massive barn studio. Anne Strout was one of those gifts you get, someone who shows up at the exact right time and offers you precisely what you need. I was struggling to make ends meet, having moved out of my communal studio and into a small space of my own in a building downtown. To keep it meant continuing to make a particular kind of work that sold decently, but which I was no longer interested in making. I was ready to move in a new direction and I needed time (and fewer expenses) so I could explore and make a lot of not necessarily sellable work.

I met Anne at Haystack School of Craft in a metalsmithing workshop. We were sharing a workstation and both burning the midnight oil in a fit of creative passion. We got to chatting and one thing led to another. Anne wasn’t planning on having a studio mate in her enormous brand new studio space. It was on her private property and she had a lot of interests and the equipment to support those interests. But she invited me to move in and I did. I was there for almost five years and we had some really good times together. I will never forget her kindness and generosity.

My current studio is spacious with a high ceiling and five big windows that flood the room with light. It has hardwood floors that I clean religiously and which are great for yoga and the occasional private dance party. It is a haven and I am grateful for it everyday. A little over two years in, I still can’t believe I get to go there to do what I love.

I was thinking about the evolution of my studio practice as I was setting up for a three day workshop in October at Snow Farm. Moving tables around, adjusting window fans, laying out palettes and heat guns, arranging paint and drawing materials, I noticed how in just a couple of hours I transformed a multi-purpose room into a painting studio.

In my old studio on Congress Street in downtown Portland in 2017. Photo credit: Claire Dibble.

There is a cadence to creating space, a rhythm and a ritual. Setting up to teach is about making the room welcoming and useful, ensuring there is enough light and proper airflow, that the layout is inviting and inspiring, but also purposeful. Then the students arrive and my role as teacher shifts to instruction, but also facilitator, listening to each student and forging connections between them, their materials, and the other individuals in the room.

During that class I had the opportunity to work alongside my students during open studio hours, something I typically don’t do. I noticed the quiet communal hum of activity, the sweetness of being together in space with likeminded people, each of us intent on our own creative process. At one point I said out loud - this is so lovely - this being together working. A student looked up and responded, “this is why I take classes - for this exact experience.”

When I broke down the room two days later, packing up supplies, returning tables and chairs to their original positions, and closing windows, I thought about how little it takes to create space for ourselves and for others.

I will be doing less teaching in 2022, as I am finding I need more time and space for my own studio practice. Each of the workshops I am offering was selected because I felt it provided students the opportunity to study in a beautiful and inspiring environment. I am particularly excited to be returning to Vermont to co-teach with my friend and fellow artist Lorraine Glessner. You can find all of my 2022 workshops here.

Chasing Progress

“Chase progress - not perfection.” This was a piece of advice from Peloton instructor Tunde Oyeneyin describing how to stay in the proper headspace as we moved into a particularly challenging section of class. It seemed so obvious. The kind of advice you might find on a coffee mug or a t-shirt. But the more I let it sink, the more wisdom I find.

When I chase progress, I am actively pursuing improvement. This requires that I notice and acknowledge improvement in the making, which is a totally different headspace than staring longingly at perfection and, knowing I will fall short of it, beating myself up.

I’ll tell you a story.

A little over a year ago, I participated in an ultra with my partner. An ultramarathon is anything over the traditional marathon length of 26 miles. This ultra was 32. Now, I'm not a runner and I hadn't trained. When my partner mentioned she wanted to try running 32 miles and suggested I might like to do a half ultra, she was already preparing to run her first marathon. Over the year prior, she had been steadily increasing her mileage according to a calculated schedule.

I said yes because I didn’t give it a whole lot of thought. It was a trail run in a national forest in South Carolina two weeks before Christmas. It was an excuse to go somewhere warmer than Maine. I planned to walk it and I figured I would get as far as I could in the time allotted.

Race day arrived and I was pleasantly surprised to find someone had shown up to run the course in a velveteen elf suit. The timekeeper gave us the countdown and we were off. Immediately I noticed no one was walking. I started jogging. I jogged very, very slowly. A kind of shuffling jog walk if you will. There was one person behind me and he looked to be in his early 80s. He kept going, so I did too.

When I tell you these folks were serious trail runners, I'm not joking. Several of them belonged to a club. They camped together and did races every other weekend. I could easily have gone down the rabbit hole of feeling inadequate, in way over my head, but it was a lovely morning. The sun was making its way up through the trees inch by inch and my body was warming up. The trail was narrow in places and wide in others. Tall grasses rustled. Birds swooped and called out. I got a cramp and stopped to walk a bit. The man behind me passed me. Now I was in last place.

Then I saw someone headed toward me. I started jogging again so as not to look bad. It was a runner who had reached the end of the first loop and was doubled back, now at the front of the pack. He was wearing an elf costume. And he was carrying a portable speaker blaring '“Feliz Navidad.” As he crossed beside me, he held out his hand for a high five. I did the same, laughing. Another runner passed me a few seconds later. He gave me a thumbs up.

My heart lifted. These guys didn’t care that I was at the back of the line limping along. They were applauding my effort; the fact that I had showed up and that I was trying.

This story doesn’t end with me beginning to train as a runner. I still wrestle to get myself to the yoga mat and on the bike and to the weights. There are just endless other things I find that need doing. This story doesn’t end there. It begins there - with someone who doesn’t know me encouraging me. “Bring your whole damn self to the table,” is another Tunde quote. It’s not enough to bring just one part of you - the part that is already good at something. You have to bring all of it and you have to try and you have to be willing to fail gloriously.

I thought about this story today as I monitored the private chat room I have going for a group of students in an online workshop. I was noticing their willingness to share their struggles with technique, to risk posting images of work in progress, and to ask questions revealing their confusion. How they complimented one another on what they were doing, pointing out things that were working.

A recent essay in Decor Maine by poet and artist Arisa White offers a beautiful series of questions to ponder as we move forward in our studios and in our lives: “Which ideas allow me to pursue my magic? What are old ideas I’ve forgotten? Where are my places of possibility? What are my daring ideas? What feels right to me? Which of my dreams have pointed the way to freedom? What do I dare to make real? What new possibilities and strengths do I taste? Where are my dark spaces within? Which fears rule my life and form my silences?”

When we chase progress, we stay in the game, we show up, we mess up, we make less-than-perfect paintings, we wrestle with the small voices in our heads that like to tell us what else we could be doing instead of this big waste of time. We laugh at those voices and keep going. If we see someone else on the path, particularly if they look like they might be struggling, maybe we give them a high five. Oh, and that elf? You guess it. He came in first. Laughing and playing his music the whole way.