The Isolation Experiment

The Isolation Experiment.

Winter in Frostburg.

This was not my first time, nor will it be my last. It's funny how brains work, how humans work, and what deprivation does. We get weird, predictably, but we get so much else too. Days are lost, times are “suggestions” that have no real meaning. But I'm getting ahead of myself; first I should explain my situation and what I was trying to do.

Six months (plus a little more) a year, I run an open studio at Penn Alps (www.spruceforest.org). There, I work on metalwork and interact directly with customers. It is great for production work, and great for paying my bills. It is less great at fostering creativity, which I prefer to do in isolation rather than a social setting. Most of my income is made between May and November, which leaves the other months “free to creative pursuits”. Now, don't start idealizing this, “wouldn't it be great fun to just make art everyday” and so on—yes, it is, but after your few accumulated ideas get completed it gets really hard to continue being creative for months with no immediate incentive. Compound that with years of struggling with “creativity” as a commodity that can be used up, 6 months of “make anything you want” is really a tough order to fill.

Through the years, I have used various methods to deal with the visual artist equivalent of “writers block”. Sometimes a new tool does it, a new technique or a new skill, but this year I wanted more from myself. I wanted to learn how to design; I wanted to understand creativity, what it is, why it is, how to use it, and how to get more from it. I wanted to find where it comes from, and the best way to harvest it.

Some small trick was not going to get the results that I wanted, I really needed to invest, to focus and to put myself in a situation to understand this process, so I chose isolation. This is not the first time I did this, nor is it the most ascetic I have ever been with it; I allowed myself about an hour of “people” a week, less Thanksgiving and New Years. The goal was November 1-March 1, but late February I realized my brain was fried and the gig was up, so I did abort the mission a bit early, but I'm not dogmatic—I'm pragmatic and I don't like the idea of wasted time.

The idea was if I stayed away from people, I would not think about people--I wouldn't put thoughts into my social relationships and it would allow me more time to think about art. It turns out social relationships run deep in surprising ways, and the things we do to maintain them take more time and brain power than I had ever envisioned until I really cut them off.

It was uncomfortable, I'm not going to lie. I am an introvert, really, I am an extreme introvert, but still my brain is wired for people. It is wired for “touch”. What happens to your senses is something I can't explain to you, but I really would recommend going a few months without any substantial physical human contact, it will really make you appreciate the next time you get a hug from a loved one.

No, those sensations, those feelings don't go away, they start out and endure as whispers that periodically say, “you are human, stop trying not to be”. But, they do blend into the background and it is not hard to move past them (although eventually, they win. They always win).

Another problem that has happened -everytime- I have done this experiment is something my hypochondriac friends would laugh at. At the first cough, or the first cut, you illogically bring yourself to the conclusion that you are going to die. To me, this is the most important part of the process, and I have -always- refused to dismiss the illogical “I’m going to die” paradigm. Maybe I am wrong, but I find it extremely important to embrace this. It instills a resolute urgency of “now”, live now. Work now. Speak now. Put everything you have on the table, work as hard as you can, because kiddo, your days are numbered, and that cough—it'll be pneumonia before you know it. And you know what, no one will know, no one will notice that you haven't been around because you set up a situation where not being around is normal. This too is important in the process—the freedom of realizing that “no one is coming” is pivotal.

All mundane things had to be simplified and mechanized as well. Food, clothing, etc, but that was easy.

So, there you have it, step 1 in this experiment, I push my mind to embrace a reality where NOW has urgent gravity, I'm on my own (I have to fully BELIEVE that my social life is closed or else those “whispers” get loud) and the mundane is settled: That is where things get started.

Where do you start a creative pursuit? What is that anyway? I set out wanting to make the best designed metalwork that I had ever done. I wanted to grow as an artist, grow as a person.

I started out by getting rid of that “built up creative energy”. Those projects that had been bouncing in my head for months, well, I made them. All of them. Whether they came out good or bad wasn't the concern to me, I wanted them out of my head. I needed an artistic detox if I was going to get anywhere, so I did just that.

Once those ideas were out in the world, I moved on. I sat. For hours. Days. I listened to music and books. Walked. I thought. I thought about everything under the sun. I meditated. I didn't want to force anything, so I let things just “be”.

I realized that I needed to identify what forms interested me. I needed to understand them. Break them down, dissect them, fully experience them. I looked at books, and magazines of all kinds of art. In my entire life, I don't think I had every studied art so much as I did in the first 4 weeks of this experiment.

I decided I needed to draw what I saw, but I had to change it, interpret it, because my mind could never comprehend what that artist did fully. Make the shapes into me. Make the composition mine. Understand how lines worked in context to other lines.

I got in the habit of drawing, nearly a full sketchbook full in a few weeks. Drawing was not enough. I had to make the 2-d ideas into my reality, translate them into my language. It was like having something to say, but being responsible for creating the words to say it.

Books were everywhere, I couldn't walk without tripping over an art book on most days. Ideas were everywhere. I became focused. I started dreaming shapes, thinking shapes and communicating in shapes. I even stopped having deep conversations with my brilliant dog because I realized all I cared about was shapes and I couldn't verbalize them to him.

Everyday, I was waking up and creating my own words. It was all encompassing, amazing, I really can't describe it well, but the work from this winter speaks it. It was flow, but not a temporary one—it was an enduring flow that was seamless, everything worked. I had converted myself into an efficient art tool, and as a tool, I was self actualized. I could see design, really see it. I understood it, felt it.

But tools are not human and I am. Those whispers, they never did get louder. They never did get more invasive. But, art is a language and once you have nothing left inside you to say, nothing left to interpret from the world around you, all that is left is the whispers of your bare humanity.

I had exhausted my curiosity about art, design and creativity, so it was time to move on. Time to leave my small house, to leave my jewelry shop in the basement and to leave the metal shop in my garage.

Time to take everything I learned and experienced and work it into being a person, an artist; use it as soil to grow in.

That is how the experiment ended. Not with a bang, but with an anti-climatic buzzer—times up, move along.

And that is a very rough synopsis of the isolation experiment.