Art in a Vacuum

A few years ago, when I was completing my final semester of college, I got the opportunity to visit the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts.  This was not only the site of the world's largest crane (since dismantled), it was also where part of The Departed was filmed and probably one of the most exciting places I've ever been.  Even though we weren't allowed, a few of us snuck off to explore and take pictures over our lunch break.  The photos from that day -- though taken quickly with a point and shoot digital camera and without a thought to framing, composition, subject matter, or general good technique -- later became part of one of my favorite creative projects.

After returning from my trip, I took those pictures to my photography professor and lamented the fact that I hadn't gotten a chance to do any "real" photography there, hadn't had time or equipment to produce "real art."  She told me I had a lot of absolute gems on that roll and I should keep going, find more locations to photograph, apply for a grant to make gigantic prints of my shipyard photos.

In the end I got the grant, took more photos, and produced a handmade artist's book to display my work.  I may be more proud of that final product than anything else I did that year.

I've often said I miss existing in a community of artists.  In college, creative people tend to flock together.  I remember fine arts, graphic design, music, theatre majors all having their own exclusive cliques.  Outside their academic work, their style of dress and social activities and parties set them apart from everyone else.  They lived and breathed their craft.

Many of us don't retain that after college.  I feel like those of us with BFAs are especially prone to end up in interesting places that don't quite line up with what's on our diploma.  We didn't go to school to be actuaries or rocket scientists or high school French teachers.  Our university's career center didn't know quite what to do with us, so if we didn't move to New York City or apply for teaching positions or start an MFA program, we made our own path in life.

I'm actually pleased with my day job, where I do a lot of writing and solve challenging problems and keep some pretty great company.  But I am definitely out of that creative element much of the time.  People are actually impressed to learn I have several six foot tall paintings in my basement that I painted myself.  They told me I was crazy to try to write 50,000 words toward a novel in one month.  At one time, either of these things might have been considered commonplace and even expected by my peers.

So as I work on editing and rewriting this novel, I have to remember what my painting professor said so many times it became cliche: you don't create art in a vacuum.  Without that creative community, I never would have pursued my Reclamation project.  I would have taken some neat pictures at an abandoned shipyard and left it at that, and people would have been impressed.  But I had a mentor who saw potential in the project and challenged me to keep going with it, flesh it out into a mature project.

My next step is to take advantage of the little creative community I have within my friends and lay out the fast, sketchy work I've done so far.  Lot's of people might say I wrote my plot beginning to end, so I wrote a novel.  I didn't.  Not yet.  I took the first hasty roll of film.  Now I have to think about why I was attracted to those scenes, take some notes, and plan my next shoot.  And to do that, I need to bring it to someone who's never seen it before and say "hey, look what I did, do you think it will go anywhere?"  Because talking about our art is a key part of understanding it, processing it, finding deeper meaning and new directions with it.  And having people working alongside us and helping critique our work in progress is a luxury we shouldn't give up once we're past taking classes.