The best way to make a dramatic leap as an artist is to stop working. After Hilary Harkness'
show at Mary Boone Gallery in 2011, she laid down her brushes for a
full month and went to southern India. Personal transformation aside,
she will never evaluate art the same way again. Here are some ideas
for ways to push your practice forward from the subcontinent.
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| From Love is What you Want |
Word is that you don’t need to
look outside yourself for creative inspiration, and that the more personal a
work is, the more universal it is. Think Tracey Emin’s tampon piece. This is
great advice for the first decade out of school, and for intermittent periods later
in life- even Louise Bourgeois took breaks from showing while she reconnected and
reorganized her work in relation to her inner life.
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| Janus Fleuri 1968 |
After leaving Yale, I painted for
myself for three years with no one looking, and no thoughts of showing at a
serious gallery. When I moved to NYC, I had no choice but to work long days,
often around the clock, to keep up with deadlines for shows. I believed that if
I had no life, I would live through my paintings, making them come alive. And
if I put all my care into making paintings, then my paintings would go out into
the world and take care of me. (I didn’t realize that my paintings couldn’t
take care of networking). My dealer Mary Boone has been a champ in that she is
hands-off when it comes to my creative process and doesn’t grouse when I turn
away collectors. Outside of casual visits from friends, I’ve done only a
handful of studio visits in the past decade, and it’s saved me from having to
keep up appearances in my studio, explain anything, or otherwise waste time.
I was able to be vulnerable and truthful in my work because I wasn’t
bracing myself against dismissive criticism (I was still worn out from
surviving Yale).
Since I’m blogging about escaping
from my studio, I want to tell you about
meeting a lovely blond backpacker in Alappuzha, Kerala after a night on a rice
barge cum houseboat. She was 29 and looking for adventure, hanging in bars (I
wondered for a minute if she was going to scam me in some way, instead, she
gave me a nonfiction book about the state of healthcare in India). She had
spent a night on a houseboat with five backpacker guys she hadn’t known
previously, and when she pulled out her camera to show us photos of a foggy Taj
Mahal she found that unbeknownst to her the guys had taken photos of their
pasty asses and equipment for her to discover later.
She told me that she had been in
India for three weeks and that it was all the same and boring. She was off to
Vietnam where she had heard that there were more backpackers. She was
more interested in backpacker monoculture than the culture around her. There’s
a time in life for living in your own world, but after a while you’re missing
out on much more interesting and important stuff.
Without healthy engagement in
reality, I believe artists become unmoored and their creativity shrivels from
lack of mental input.
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| Genitals, Forrest Bess | |
Only a few of us can be Forrest Best, the penultimate
outsider artist, but with genital mutilation on the docket (a belief in
sacrificing everything to creativity, including ejaculation), it’s better to
“sell out” and join the fray.
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| Untitled (No. 5), Forrest Bess, 1949 |
What dogma about creativity has
you by the throat?
