Sorry for not posting last week, it turns out that the Amish have yet to perfect a computer that doesn’t run on whoopee pies and handmade bread. You’d think they’d have figured it out by now but that is not the case. But I’m back in the JC and ready to take the new year by the stones.
Today will be spent getting everything in my tiny world back in order. There’s an amazing amount of stuff piled on my desk and all of it needs a home, even if that home is the recycle bin. By this afternoon, I’ll be back in the swing of things.
So… what do I have to offer to you about my professional life these days…? Hm. Well, over the holidays, I spent a considerable amount of time in my father’s dark room which confirmed a notion that’s been slowly developing in my brain for awhile: I can’t really focus when I work with other people. That’s not to say that I don’t like doing stuff with others. My friend, Adam, and I had a blast printing old negatives and I enjoyed helping my dad rework some of his prints; but none of that was “work”. It was just fun. And I’m sure that if I had some new negatives from which to print or was trying to be a photographer, I would have been able to get some “work”… but I didn’t and I’m not.
Now this thinking 86-ed my dreamy, faux-egalitarian belief that I can work anywhere. Sure, I can draw anything anywhere, but that’s drawing and not “working”. There’s a subtle distinction between the two activities. It turns out that I probably do need to be able to throw on the headphones or shut a door and be in my own little world. The notion of me cranking out books in a room with my family and friends going about their noisy and awesome lives is very much dead and gone. Which is very annoying.
Anyway, as usual, time spent in the dark room felt productive even if it was just printing stuff to be seen only by the crazy people weird enough to spend 18+ hours in a tiny, chemically perfumed, red-lit room. I think that being in the dark room is as close as I’ve ever come to having a “studio”. Obviously, in my Jersey City life and all my previous lives, there was literally no room to make a studio. Space has always been in short supply. But the lesson that I need to learn from the dark room is to create an area, even if it is the corner of my bedroom, where the only thing that can happen is “work”. I mean, it’s quite obvious with film photography: you process film and print photographs in the dark room because it’s the only place where you can process film and make prints. Because it’s such a single purpose space, it’s almost impossible not to be productive. If you go into the dark room, you will make something photography related. You can’t go into the dark room and get distracted by painting or doing the dishes or worrying about nonsense on the internet. All you can do is make negatives or prints. It’s that simple.
The trick, it seems, is to bring that kind of thinking to the real world. Sure, it would be easier if I had a studio that was an damn-near empty room in a building other than the one where I live… thus creating a space where the only thing to do would be to sit my butt down and make drawings; but that’s not the situation I have going for me. So, I get to see if I can conjure the mental fortitude… or delusion, which would allow me to take the sunny corner of my bedroom, right next to the burny radiator and make that the only few square feet on the planet that really mean anything.
As always, the problem comes down to how do I create a mental construct through which I can channel my attention on something as weird as making pen & ink drawings.
Plus, as my dad pointed out, if I had an ideal studio situation I would be bored and get nothing done. I like having to fight against limitations. It’s what I do.
Hm. Oh well, off to build a studio in my mind.
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