Discover more from The Studio Reset
Once upon a time known as “five years ago this week,” I put on a very strange robe and stood in line to have one of my very favorite people put a velvet piece of fabric around my head and declare me A Master of the Fine Arts. Roughly a week following, I then went to the bowels of an administrative room to get a very funny paper that stated that I, indeed, was A Master of the Fine Arts. (It must be said that diplomas are always strange things, but this one is Next Level™, as they say.)
And then, as far as the digital record could show, I didn’t really… make anything.
This wasn’t entirely true, but neither was it untrue; more or less, I’ve been in a creative hiatus for the past five years. I’ve also made a last-minute move across the country, witnessed the untimely death of my mother, survived an ill-fitting job, survived A Disease That Is Probably Known As COVID-19, and subsequently survived the strange and terrible mental breakdown and chronic exhaustion that paired with it. Which: when one writes it out that way, of course I’ve neglected a practice that doesn’t quite fit into the Mountain West of the United States.
But still.
But still: as all “good” artists, I’m haunted by the first reading I ever had in undergraduate, from the good ol’ art school chestnut Art and Fear. Was I a statistic? A washed-up, has-been artist?
Or was I, as my art practice always seems to harp on about, a chronically ill artist that had five years’ worth of horrific luck? Interesting, how Bayles and Orland never really discuss that. Oh well.
One could say that The Studio Reset specifically is here to answer that question. I’ve tried a lot of projects in the past five years, thrown a lot of spaghetti to see if it sticks. After all, if I’m doing this in between the infamous “day job,” I better like it, no? Fingers crossed, it’s a litany of things I’m discovering from the studio. Or it may simply be one page standing as a memorial of a very short and delightful art career.
I’m not going to ask you to subscribe, given the risk of that. But hey, fingers crossed this becomes regular enough that I’ll have reason.