Opening your studio to the public is fraught with complication.
The first, and most pressing problem, is that the studio is not set up for the public. Storing your staple gun and glass cleaner on the lowest shelf makes perfect sense until you have toddlers running around your space. Your walls are a repository for work in progress, not a neutral (or even particularly clean) space for the presentation of finished work. Ultimately, the act of making the studio suitable for company automatically renders it unsuitable for working— a bit of a conundrum since people are, one assumes, coming to see a bit of the artist in their "natural habitat."
Furthermore (and this is really the hardest part for me as an artist), it is odd to be so exposed. When you work in isolation for so long you come to accept the faults and little journeys each work takes as it moves towards completion. You have a relationship with the locations of objects, and there is meaning in how the space is arranged that is deeply personal. To throw open your doors is to invite in a public with no context as to why this drawing is always put down next to this drawing on the worktable, or why all the lights are oriented towards a blank portion of wall. There are stories there, and they are personal, and you think about them being encountered with great brevity and a paucity of background information and you start to feel a bit self conscious.
When I went to bed last night I thought about the first few lines of one of my favorite poems. It is titled Open House, and is written by the American poet Theodore Roethke. It illuminates, with an admirable simplicity, what I've been trying for express for the last three paragraphs:
My secrets cry aloud.
I have no need for tongue.
My heart keeps open house,
My doors are widely swung.
The first, and most pressing problem, is that the studio is not set up for the public. Storing your staple gun and glass cleaner on the lowest shelf makes perfect sense until you have toddlers running around your space. Your walls are a repository for work in progress, not a neutral (or even particularly clean) space for the presentation of finished work. Ultimately, the act of making the studio suitable for company automatically renders it unsuitable for working— a bit of a conundrum since people are, one assumes, coming to see a bit of the artist in their "natural habitat."
Furthermore (and this is really the hardest part for me as an artist), it is odd to be so exposed. When you work in isolation for so long you come to accept the faults and little journeys each work takes as it moves towards completion. You have a relationship with the locations of objects, and there is meaning in how the space is arranged that is deeply personal. To throw open your doors is to invite in a public with no context as to why this drawing is always put down next to this drawing on the worktable, or why all the lights are oriented towards a blank portion of wall. There are stories there, and they are personal, and you think about them being encountered with great brevity and a paucity of background information and you start to feel a bit self conscious.
When I went to bed last night I thought about the first few lines of one of my favorite poems. It is titled Open House, and is written by the American poet Theodore Roethke. It illuminates, with an admirable simplicity, what I've been trying for express for the last three paragraphs:
My secrets cry aloud.
I have no need for tongue.
My heart keeps open house,
My doors are widely swung.
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