Study in the Studio

This past week I was trying to incorporate "Study. A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit," another suggestion from Bruce Mau's "Incomplete Manifesto for Growth." At first, and for most of the week, I had no idea what this was about, what it meant, what it was leading to or how to apply it. That all changed this morning.

This morning during my daily painting time (I set aside several hours everyday to paint regardless of what else is going on that day) I was trying to determine what I was going to work on and how to approach it. Over the past several weeks, mainly due to several fortuitous accidents, I have developed another process yielding a twist in my style. But the process is still immature but is still showing a lot of potential. That being said, I wanted to try the process again with a few minor changes and see what would happen. More experimentation.

That's when it hit me. With each experiment I conducted, I was looking for the similarities and differences between the previous works and the current one using the same or similar process. I was "studying" the results, that is to say, I was noting how changing the process affected the final work. I was hung up on my definition of studying from school which was nothing more the repitition and memorization. Studying is more. It is exploration, examination, experimentation, documentation and playing.

Like many of the previous suggestions from the "Incomplete Manifesto" I explored, I think there is a necessity to suspend current prejudice and eliminate (or at least reduce) the my propensity to focus on the final outcome. If I look to the end, I miss the differences and the similarities. I am unable to study. It makes me question my education where I spent my time cramming just to receive a good grade. Learning was not part of studying past. Achievement was. Achievement is not studying.

As a result of this morning, I have started a notebook where I am documenting my observations of working with resin. It reminds me of my lab book in graduate school. In fact, now I see my studio as a laboratory, not a place of production.

The other benefit that I notice is that again, this helps pull me back into living the moment and not focus on the future. I'm beginning to see the pattern in the "Incomplete Manifesto." I'll have to study it further.

This week, I will be examining the next suggestion which is "Drift. Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism."