fbpx

Category: order

Posted on

OC, forget about the D

Neat people get a bad rap in the arts. Still, I think it’s the best way to work.

Bathtime, by Carol L. Douglas
“What my mother would love the most for her birthday,” my daughter once announced, “is for me to go to her house and throw something away.” Immediately, my in-box lit up with suggestions for help with my hoarding problem.
That wasn’t what Mary was saying. In fact, I’m ruthless about order. Buying me something would be a waste of time and money.
I came home from Nova Scotia to ants. There were three different sizes, all darting around the kitchen. “There’s no food lying out,” protested my husband when I suggested that scrubbing might help.
Still life, by Carol L. Douglas
A concatenation of events led to the breakdown of our household standards. I was traveling. Our washing machine is broken, and the new one has been on back-order for weeks. Kids flitted home for the summer. The elderly dog’s incontinence is now the norm.
My husband is also what we currently call a ‘creative’ (he writes software). He purports to be unaffected by disorder. I’m skeptical. Popular wisdom tells us that creatives are messier than average. That doesn’t mean they ought to be.
I can paint without vacuuming the pillbugs in the basement, even though I know they’re there. But if there’s unopened mail or laundry that needs to be folded; I need to deal with it immediately, before I go in my studio.
Still life, by Carol L. Douglas
I haven’t always been this way. The public rooms in my childhood home were neat; the upstairs was a mess. My mother worked full time, had a big house, and raised a slew of kids. I did the same thing, with the same results.
My siblings and I were diagnosed as ‘hyperactive’. Teachers said my kids were ADHD. Too late, I realized that they should really be tagged “children of an over-committed mother.” I started being more tyrannical about cleaning.
Tracey Emin may not be my favorite artist, but she was right when she pointed out that “there are good artists that have children. Of course there are. They are called men.” The amount of work needed to raise children and pursue a career as an artist is overwhelming. It’s even more complicated when your work and living space are jumbled together.
Still life, by Carol L. Douglas
Our ancestors had to be neater than we are. They didn’t live in a throwaway culture. Tools were treasured, so they were oiled and put back as soon as they were used. Spending on food and clothing went from consuming half the family budget in 1900 to less than a fifth in 2000. When something took so much work and effort to acquire, one didn’t treat it lightly.
Today we all wallow in stuff. Many young people have told me they think they’re OCD. That’s just something they say when experiencing the strange compulsion to clean for the first time. “No,” I reply, “you’re anxious because neat is your normal state, but you haven’t embraced it yet. Go clean your room.” Many of those kids haven’t internalized that ‘perfect is the enemy of good,’ nor have they learned how to be organized.
The downside of having a studio in your house is that you can’t just go to the office to escape your home. I struggled through last week, tired and barely meeting my obligations. Finally, on Saturday, we gave the place a thorough cleaning. Suddenly, my energy and the urge to be creative are back again. Fancy that.
Posted on

Mastering chaos

Francis Bacon is the icon of messy-studio advocates. He was renowned as much for the awful state of his studio as for his brilliant painting, but he did occasionally attempt to clear it. Electrician Mac Robertson was working at Bacon’s studio when he saw the artist disposing of ephemera. He asked to keep it, and thirty years later, sold it for more than a million dollars. There’s a lesson in that, but I hardly know what it is. 

For the first time since June I am home without another trip (planned or emergency) on my immediate horizon. It’s autumn and my favorite season to paint, and I will get outside to do that, but my primary goal has to be to pull my studio and home in order for fall.

There is a myth that creatives enjoy working in chaos, but that isn’t true. All people tend to create messes when in the throes of work, but most of them understand that when they are finished, they need to clean them up. Creating order doesn’t come easily to me, but as an adult I’ve learned it’s the only way I can be productive.
Contemporary Australian painter McLean Edwards continues the Bacon tradition in his Sydney studio. If I were his mother, I’d tell him to clean that mess up, and to stop drinking while painting.
I think this idea of the messy artist is a continuation of the myth of artists-as-geniuses, and it actually stops many people from being as productive as they might otherwise be. The vast majority of us do not thrive in chaotic working and living conditions. I’ve been in many of my peers’ studios, and most of them are sensible, organized workrooms. (In some cases, what an outsider perceives as clutter is actually just order in a very small space.)
I would normally “reset” my studio and workshop in the early fall anyway—go through my stock, winnow supplies, and reorganize shelves. For me, chaos effectively blanks out all thinking, and I like the idea of spring and fall cleaning.
To the contrary, note that Jackson Pollock’s chaos was pretty much confined to his canvases. 
This year, it’s worse, because my RIT show was pulled for being obscene, and the work ended up stacked in the middle of my studio floor. At a loss about how to put it away in a hurry, I moved it to my bedroom, where it’s still in the way. Until I get it properly stored, there’s no easy living in my house.
On top of that, there are three months of mail to go through, and three months of dirt to vacuum. (My family did a decent job of maintaining order, but the finer points of housekeeping are beyond them.)

Message me if you want information about next year’s classes and workshops.