Chasing Beauty

Graphite powder falls on pristine white paper.

It is stunning—the way the dust filters through the air and lands scattered across the page. In some places, the graphite piles in dozens of tiny circular mounds. In others, a delicate and even dusting of powder blankets the surface. Yet, the whole page can breathe because large portions of the work remain an undisturbed white.

I fall in love with the chaos.

I cannot keep from laughing at myself as I dance alone in my studio, punching a scrap sheet of paper sprinkled with graphite and watching dark dust rain down on my finished work. Who the hell does this for a living?

It feels random, which contrasts with my normal, tightly drawn traditional work. I have no control over where the graphite lands. While the unknown scares me, I find myself caught up in the excitement of the unexpected, and I keep chasing it. I watch as another round of graphite disperses across the page. For the first time in a long while, I feel free in the studio.

Behind the madness, I have a tight studio deadline. I have invested substantial time and money into preparing this substrate. I feel insane taking such risks with an important and already behind schedule work. This is exactly the type of thing I am not supposed to do.

But I am not sure I care about the rules anymore. Besides, the music told me to do it.

Now, how do I adhere this beautiful mess to the surface?

I ask the music, and the disaster in the studio grows… Alcohol? Water? Fixative? Parts of the paper are saturated in liquid now, and the whole scene begins to marble together. I am no longer consciously aware of anything. I keep chasing beauty, and it all just starts to happen.

The work wants me to touch it. I hear the graphite on sandpaper and then on the page. Warm gray forms develop as the white of the paper fades into life.

Days like today remind me I love to celebrate beauty in chaos. I remember my early years of work and worry I have somehow lost the magic along the way. It used to be enough for my work to suggest beauty—to point at or illude to it. I miss those days.

I start to worry my artistic practice, like most other areas of my life, is now overworked.

I have a terrible habit of pushing myself so hard that I twist my favorite pastimes into personal punishments. As a former long-distance runner, I am guilty of running until my bones break underneath my body weight. Sadly, I have done this multiple times. I am fearful the same evolution has followed me into the studio.

I draw and blend the paper until it starts to come apart. I work until I am taking from the art, and it is taking from me. At the end of the day, I am emotional and often convinced I cannot draw. By the time I finish a drawing, I can’t stand to look at it. All I see are flaws, the parts of the work I know I could have drawn better. Like a scolded child, I enter my next drawing timid and ashamed. This cycle goes round and round.

How did my practice end up here? I remind myself when no one is watching, I still end up in the studio, making a huge mess, dancing around with two dozen pencils strewn across my drawing table.

Somehow my private process became public. Apparently, I am even supposed to film my #WIP for Instagram. My studio door slides open way too many times a day… what was once created in deep solitude is now open for public critic.

But when no one is watching, I am free in the studio. Free to take risks. Free to make mistakes. Free to embrace those mistakes. Free to draw and leave undrawn. Free to create work that points to and celebrates beauty but does not strain itself to harness it.

I find myself excited about creating work again. I end the day with a vow to reclaim the solitude and privacy of my studio. (...even searched Amazon for cheap curtains and opaque vinyl I can apply to my studio glass.)

Who knows what will happen behind those closed studio doors? Maybe I will submit this work to the museum half-drawn, quiet and humble—full of empty space which anticipates the haphazard, chaotic beauty that arrives with the future.