Painting is an investigatory process, a practice of diving deep within to make manifest what is there. Paintings are records of their creators at particular moments in time. And the studio is a laboratory where the discipline of painting takes place. For me, the act of painting is guided by questions and some of the most helpful are also the simplest.
Students who have taken next level encaustic workshops with me know that I love to share writing prompts from Mapping The Intelligence of Artistic Work: An Explorative Guide to Making, Thinking, and Writing by author Anne West. Mapping, West posits, is “a process of visualization and spatial transcription” that “organizes relevant bits of information and fragments from the imagination into some kind of structure.”
I discovered this text in 2011, and brought it with me to an artist residency where I used it to practice proprioceptive writing each morning before I began working. The questions served as tools to parse what my work was about, where it was going, and what I hoped to accomplish. They gave me the beginning fragments of a language I could use to form my artist statement and they pointed the direction to major shifts on both the micro and the macro level.
Some of the realizations I had during this residency, as both the result of the writing and the long hours alone working, didn’t feel profound at the time, but gradually led to larger changes in the way I approached my painting practice. I recognized, for example, that I needed time to settle in and prepare myself to work, that my best work was made when I allowed myself whole days to paint, rather than snatching bits and pieces where I could. This led to a reorganization of my priorities and my schedule.
A few years later, I picked up Mapping again and began writing. Somewhere between “Think of your work as a question. What does it ask?” and “Create a wish list for your work. What elements might it be requesting?” I found myself saying “I want to work larger” and then “I need a bigger brush.” At the International Encaustic Conference that year, I found the brush of my dreams, one I continue to work with to this day.
“Maps are enterable from any side,” West notes. “We make the map, and the map makes us. Maps are living sketches of us immersed in our work.”
During my annual encaustic retreat in September, I guided a group of students through these questions as part of a professional development workshop. A few weeks after the retreat I received an email from one of those students who shared with me how grateful she was for that exercise. The writing allowed her to step outside her own constructed limitations and “open a door” within herself. The questions ‘What does your art need?’ and ‘What is it asking for?’ prompted her to seek and find a studio of her own outside of her home, which she described as a “game changer.”
“Maps are enterable from any side,” West notes. “We make the map, and the map makes us. Maps are living sketches of us immersed in our work. They have the capacity to stir the imagination of others. Maps question and maps clarify. Everything on a map signifies, points out a direction, intent. The maps we generate are like eyes. They give us perspective. Maps establish connectivity.”