art asks you to reconsider your relationship to the world

1/18 in a series on what art is and why it matters

I have a printout hanging by my desk that I found many years ago from the studio of Ólafur Elíasson based on his work, Art-Is, 2019.

The work includes 18 lines about art starting with the title from this post. Each line is a powerful reminder about “why” art matters and every time I feel doubt about my own studio practice, I read it.

It gave me an idea to create a series of posts sharing the art lessons emerging from my studio organized around the 18 lines, starting with the first one:

art asks you to reconsider your relationship to the world

So what lesson is emerging from my studio around this idea?

The last few years have been particularly quiet for me. Not just on social feeds, but in my actual life. I really needed to retreat to a place where I could focus my energy on the changes happening in life and find a place where re-emergence into the world could feel possible and hopeful again.

The re-emergence has been slow but maybe there is a lesson in the slow things in life. Without the quiet and the slow, are we truly able to consider what our relationship to the world is and consciously choose our path in it?

And so, here begins my slow story on returning to my studio practice:

Last fall (almost a year ago), I felt a spark of curiosity in my studio. I discovered a technique to transfer images using graphite on the backside of a drawing that transfers a ghost of a line to a new sheet of paper when tracing over the image. It made me wonder if I could use this transfer method to create watercolor works for a series of plant line drawings I made a decade ago during a 100 day project.

The original drawings were ones that became a part of a collaborative project called Gratitude Blooming. A total of 39 plants were paired with a theme (a word that was ‘spoken’ to me while in deep concentration drawing each plant) and each theme has a reflection prompt. They were made into a card deck and a set of note cards and have been used in hundreds of gratitude circles to help people pause, notice the present moment and share their experience of gratitude with others in the context of one of the drawings. I’ve been moved by so many stories from these circles and what is possible when we reconnect with nature and others by moving beneath the surface of our lives in the presence of others.

The drawings have always felt like they could be botanical style watercolors but I’ve never had the patience to learn how to use watercolors. So slowly over the course of the past year, I asked the plants to speak to me again to help me learn how.

See the full set of watercolors on studio-love.net

The whole process has breathed new life into my studio, reminding me that one of the real gifts of art is not just the final work, but the transformation that happens in the process of making it. And experiencing this transformation makes me want to offer this slow question to you:

How does art ask you to reconsider your relationship to the world?

Stay tuned as I find my voice on this new platform and please consider subscribing or following me here to join this 18 post series on what art is and why it matters.

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Next in the series: art challenges your habitual modes of perception