My First Studio

When I was in college and debating between being a psychology major and minor, one of the areas of study that interested me was the effect surroundings have on creativity, emotion, and learning. There are places that are inherently creative, ones where our minds can’t help but wander, and ones that immediately make us feel angry. As I began hypothesizing I thought about the different factors: visual make-up, personal connection, cultural symbolism.

While this still interests me greatly, when I decided to make psychology my minor and pick up two art forms as my double major, I chose to address this question in reality rather than within the settings of a psychological test. Although my quantifiable outcome may not be as persuasive, I believe that through studying places that bring specific emotions, particularly creativity, I will be able to recreate them in a directed setting.

Currently, I’m sitting in the studio where I took my first steps as a visual artist and created my first series of paintings. I can see the paint spots on the floor from my brush and the beads scattered around the studio from my drawing. As soon as I step inside the glass doors of what was for four years my creative center. my minds starts to whirl. I am here now not to create my own work, but to support my closest friend as she does hers, and yet my mind fills itself with possibilities.

Much of my inspiration for starting a community art center comes from this space. It is a giant room on the third floor of the art building with a high yellow ceiling and tall windows with swiveling planks of wood that serve as shades. Apparently, it used to be a gym.

There are no walls in this space except for the four that create its outer limits. Instead, stacked cubbies built together and placed on wheels create barriers less than half the height of the room which turn this wide open space into a maze of sorts. It was a maze that I memorized, down to every detail, during my time as a college student.

Because the space is open, noises drift uninterrupted throughout. Classes overlap, music blends together, the pounding of hammers and the harsh click of staple guns echo throughout. A constant flow of creativity twines itself through the false cubby-walls, the echo of years upon years of inspiration.

When I was creating my art in this room, discovering who I was and who I wanted to be, I could look up from my canvas to whoever else was in the room and ask their opinion or just how they were. We were a community, a support system, one that I know lives on without me in it. Of course there were aggravations and irritations, painter’s block and spilled paint, but in the end all of this gets absorbed into the greater creativity atmosphere.

This atmosphere is what I aim to capture, what I want to make available to those who didn’t or don’t have the money to find it in a college setting, who did have the money but wouldn’t spend it on art, who had it and had to leave it after four wondrous years, to everyone who cares to experience it. Sometimes all it takes to feel creative, to become an artist, is to be in the right place, encouraged by the right people. While the true artists are the ones who can capture this energy and hold it within themselves, in my art center I want to open up that possibility to everyone, if only for the one hour a week they can spare to come to my studio.

The Community Part of Community Art

For a long time I didn't have very good friends. There were people I was close with, people I spent time with, people I saw everyday, even people that I thought I would know for the rest of my life, but it wasn't until college that I truly began to build my community.

My college years created the two closest friendships that I have, that I have ever had. Through the past four or so years with these two wonderful women, and with the many other incredible people who have helped to shape who I am, I've learned what it means to be close to someone. For me, the closest form of intimacy doesn't come from sharing secrets, sex, or history. It comes from the exchange of ideas.

There comes a point when I'm so deeply wrapped in a conversation that I lose track of where my thoughts end and my companion's begin; when the idea forming in my mind comes out of their mouth. It is through these discourses that I discovered my passion for human connection, through whatever means available to me, and then came up with a way to channel that passion into an actual life.

I've lost count of the number of times that a new idea has formed while my mouth is moving, butting its way into whatever conversation that inspired its birth. That's how I first came up with my plan to start a community art center, one month into the fall semester of my junior year of college. I pulled out my notebook just now and flipped to September 9th, 2009, the day the idea was formed. A single page of notebook paper is covered in messy pencil with The Salon (the original title of my center) scrawled across the stop. I can still remember my hand moving across the now familiar page as I sat in the dining hall of my college campus, waiting for my closest friend to get out of her art history class so I could explode my new idea, that I got from talking to my own art history professor, onto her.

I do indeed tend to explode when I have an idea. My sister calls it "bubbly Miranda" which, despite not carrying the gravity I would like, is the most accurate description of the state I enter when a new idea is forming. Words and phrases bubble out of me, bursting into the world through the conversation of whoever I am talking with at the moment. My eyes become cartoonishly wide and my hands, or rather my entire arms, swing from place to place as if I am preforming as a storyteller.

Since the birth of The Salon, I have talked with what must be over a hundred people about it, always expanding and developing both myself, my idea, and the person with whom I am talking. Through these conversations, which increased dramatically when I moved to Boston and began my master's degree at Lesley University, The Salon has evolved into Creative Spaces and, most recently, CATCH Art: the Creative Haven. (Get it? It's a self-retaining acronym! Eek!)

I've spoken with friends, family members, mentors, strangers, even people I don't like all that much, and they have each added their own flavor to my idea, if only by listening as I talked to them. I've read books and articles, started writing this blog, filled up countless notebooks, and created endless files on my computer as I continue my external thought development. Currently, I have a ten year plan for my art center. I have no idea what it will look like in the end because I have no idea who I will talk to in the time between now and then. All I know is that every conversation I have continues to build the community of people who have heard and helped with my idea and with the development of myself.

For the past few weeks I've been thinking about writing this post, drawing attention to the people part of community art. I spend a lot of time writing and thinking about the children I teach and the teachers I learn from, but just as important, if not more important, are the people who I teach and learn with. The people who listen to me, who talk to me, who dream with me.

There was quote at the beginning of one of my classes this semester which I have not been able to get out of my mind; "I write so I can find out what I am thinking" by Jerome Bruner. Obviously, just glance down the page, this is true for me. But I would have to say, more accurately, I converse so I can find out what I am thinking, and once I know what I think, I know what I am going to do.

Communities of Artists

So far I've been focusing mostly on communities creating art, which makes sense when trying to define Community Art. I've listened to musicians, read about museums, and researched as much as I can before I get distracted by my next big idea. But there is another important way that community art can be created; along with the idea of a communities creating art, there is the sister idea of artists creating communities.

This brings to mind, for me at least, a mental image of a grainy gray picture with a group of wealthy, white Europeans sitting around a tea table talking about the wide world. (Either that or scantily clad 60's hippies). While both can technically fall under this notion of a community of artists, I'm thinking on a broader, vaguer scale.

The first way I began to think about a community of artists, because of course there is always more than one way, was when I went to the MFA in Boston and saw an exhibit of the Rouen Cathedrals. In this room five original Monet paintings of the Rouen Cathedral face five Lichtenstein silkscreens inspired by those paintings. The dialogue created, not only between the paintings themselves but between the artists and their separate contexts, made me consider the fluid contemporary and historical community of artists.

Artists, like everyone else, do not live in a vacuum. They see things, read things, experience things, and this effects what they create. One of the most interesting parts of my collegiate level artistic education was when I realized that I was becoming a part, no matter how insignificant that part is, of the continuous community of artists that has existed as long as the human race.

Although artists are often thought of in the romantic light of a solitary genius, and indeed many fit that description, there is always a community of which them (we) can be a part. The solidarity of creative solitary-ness; the rich history which we come from and create. That is my first, grand scale, appropriately vague description of Community Art being a community of artists.

The second is much simpler and everyday. It is the interaction between fellow artists; the dialogue that takes place in a communal studio or in a classroom critique. Artists coming together to create a community and from that community creating better art pieces, inspiring each other, pushing each other forward. As any artist who has worked within a close-knit group knows, the frustration and agitation that come from working with a bunch of wired, creative, free-thinkers is balanced by the energy of creativity that flows around any such group.

A truly incredible experience is when the two separate definitions of Community Art (communities creating art and artists creating communities) crash together. Then we get the splendid debacle of Communities of Artists creating Art. While far from the ultimate or best definition of Community Art (because I doubt there is such a thing), this image definitely brings to mind the incredible realm of possibilities that open to us when people collaborate in creation.