Fortress of Solitude

As I sit down to write a blog post about the importance of creating a positive, low distraction, working environment for oneself as an artist, I am immediately encountering certain challenges and ironies. I set up my laptop at my worktable and am about to sit down when Zig the cat (Zig lives in my studio space and over the years has become an important part of my process), steals my place. I try to kindly explain to him that I am about to do some work and gently push him to the floor. He does not take kindly to this, choosing to deposit his frustration in the nearby litter-box all the while maintaining, might I say, an unnerving amount of intense, unwavering eye contact. I clean the litter-box, take the garbage outside, wash my hands and again, attempt to sit down and work. Zig, seeing this, chooses to knock over a stack of records while simultaneously unplugging my laptop. Zig is encouraged to go outside through an open, ground level window. Perfect, now I can work. Except, I need tea. Great, I have tea but now I have to pee. Ok, perfect, but I realize that I must have candy. Candy acquired, I go to sit down again and realize that the whole process would be less distracting if I was to put on headphones. I put on headphones,…ok,…I think you see what I mean.

All of the above distractions are happening on a normal day in what I would describe as an ideal environment within which to get work done. Creating this environment has actually come at the end of a semi-long process. It’s this process that I’d actually like to write about and not the cat specifically, promise.

Since leaving NSCAD, I have always had a dedicated workspace of one kind or another. Sometimes my workspace is a separate room within a living space, sometimes it has been a dedicated space outside of the home. This space has always been a sacred space of sorts, in that it has always been uniquely dedicated to making work and it has always been accessible twenty-four, seven.  Lately, it has occurred to me that some very specific conditions have to exist for me to be able to do any quality work and I’ve given myself permission to become bull-headedly, single minded about this.

The space has to be organized (obviously, “organized” is up for wild interpretation) and clean (I understand the irony of “clean” coming from a person who works almost exclusively in the media of broken electronics and dead bugs). Everything has its place and there must be enough floor space to be able to comfortable walk around, or roll as the case may be.

At certain points (hours, days, years) I must be left completely alone with no distractions. I have the same rule for my studio space that most vampire societies have. You may absolutely come and visit me but in order to enter, you must be invited.

The space has to have good energy, or if it has bad energy, it can only be my own. Having spent week long periods working on projects while sobbing and listening to the soundtrack from the movie Vanilla Sky over and over again, I can definitely attest to the healing power that continuing to work on any project of any kind can have over a broken heart. Also, the idea that my personal life and my art life are correlated but not contingent is of great comfort to me. For example, I’ve also shed my fair share of tears in the walk-in fridges of the food service industry over one sad time or another but it has in no way prevented me from making a hell of a god-damned, good sandwich. Similarly, so long as I can see and use my hands, I can produce a very respectable drawing while at the same time wetly lamenting the temporality of love.

Though the specifics of this process are, I’m sure, very different for every artist, I imagine there are certain aspects that we all have in common. Space, however you may choose to define it, is key. This may mean that you create a psychic space for your work where you prioritize the energy you dedicate to it over many other things. Depending on the nature of your work, you may also require a physical space, for most of us it’s a combination of the two.

Making these rules has come through trial and error. Any violation of said conditions has definitely come at my peril. I currently live in a space that is definitely more studio than apartment and is only inhabited by me and two, small, feline, assistants.  I realize now that the tone of this post may (quite fairly) make me seem hermit-like and standoffish. I certainly don’t mean to imply that I don’t like visitors. In fact, I’d love it if you visited me, just call ahead, and oh-my-god, please bring cake!

The Pleasure Principle

If I’m going to be completely honest, one of the things that I think sustains my practice more than any other element is the direct bodily pleasure I derive from the hands on, day-to-day grind of making art. It’s the enjoyment that I receive directly from putting pencil to paper, paint to board or glue and wire to bee (as the case may be) that shapes the look and structure of the works I choose to produce, at least in part. To put it simply, it just feels good.

When sitting down to plan a work, after I’ve considered the imagery and composition and other more cerebral elements of the message, consciously or unconsciously part of me considers how best to drag out the time it takes to make it simply because I love doing it so damn much. “Hmmm, this piece could realistically only take me a couple of hours, what can I do to make the whole process as tedious and painful as possible? I mean, my wrists have been feeling fine lately. What can I do to bring on that special carpal tunnel burn?” Is this a masochistic impulse? Yes, probably. But there’s more to it than that.

Sure, there’s definitely an element of insecurity; as though the hours spent making something will justify it as a worthy work. But I think the greater part of it is seeing practice as a meditation. The act of putting pencil to paper (or what have you) thousands upon thousands of times creates a kind of useful cathartic trance. It separates my mind from the mundanity of every day life in a way that feels transcendent. It creates a space devoid of language that is simply blissful to exist in. I’ll work in this state for hours before my tired body reminds me to reconnect to the physical world with boring reminders to drink some water, enjoy a cigarette or use the washroom.

When compared to more collaborative media like film and music, visual art can be a solitary, sometimes very lonely pursuit. This reality seems to put it at odds with it being, at least for me, about connection with others. Making very elaborate, labour intensive work feels like a way of honouring my audience, like a kind of social contract: “Please spend some time looking at my drawing because I spent a long time making it. And, hey, I really like you a lot and want to have made something that makes you feel good or bad or strange, or really anything at all will do. Just wanna connect with you somehow, k? Thanks.”

I also like to think that incorporating an element of mystery in a work, whether it be bigness or smallness or intricacy will insert another level of possible engagement for a viewer. “Hey, what’s going on with this? How was this made and of what?” I hope these added intricacies will create an impalpable richness that makes the work more interesting to look at and therefore create more possibility for the viewer. Admittedly, it could also be that I am an overbearing, megalomaniacal, control freak, so there’s that. 

After a certain level of training and practice it makes sense to me that if one is going to sustain a lifelong practice one should be allowed to play to one’s strengths. I’m not very spontaneous but I am patient; it just makes sense to me to work this way. Everyday practice creates balance and purpose in my life and helps me to maintain my sanity. It’s somehow a great comfort to know that I will run out time before I run out of ideas.

So what do you think, dear reader? What are your thoughts on the daily grind of making work? How does this stuff work for you? This friendly neurotic welcomes your input, thoughts and opinions. Ring my bell, comment or send me an email (ruthvmarsh@hotmail.com).

Corpus Melliferous: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Just Draw Pictures

After spending four years in various and sundry drawing courses at NSCAD I had developed somewhat of a complex about my drawing. “Your drawing could use some work.” and “Your drawing isn’t strong.” were repeated themes in all of my drawing courses. I don’t mean to call for sympathy in admitting this; I acknowledged that my instructors were quite correct; my drawings had always lacked a certain level of technical accuracy. The drawings themselves weren’t bad but my “drawing”: my technical ability to reproduce things as I saw them was definitely lacking.  So as much I understood this difference and as much as I was able to improve my skills, my drawing ability remained something to be desired. I lost confidence and I stopped enjoying making drawings and, for the most part, I stopped making drawings altogether.

In an advanced painting course, some time close to graduation, I learned that there are ways around this shortcoming; I had options! After all, Mary Fucking Pratt (I believe that is her real middle name.) uses an overhead projector to block in her incredible paintings and Chuck God-Damned Close does incredible work using grids! But still, dear reader, I was ashamed! *melodramatic weeping* What was I to do?!

For years I avoided drawing, making only the most rudimentary sketches to plan the compositions of my paintings. I would use grids to block in images from photos for my paintings and hoped there would be no follow-up questions. I felt that I was “getting away with it” but companion to this feeling is the surety that eventually, my proverbial “jig” would be “up”.  And, deep down, I somehow felt cheated; like the robot who couldn’t love, I was the somewhat anticlimactic artist version: I was the painter who couldn’t actually draw all that well.

So, fast-forward a few years to the Fall of 2010. I decided to rent a studio space outside of my apartment and dedicate its use to, among several other things, facing down my drawing demon and befriending it. I wanted to feel comfortable drawing; I wanted to love drawing for itself. I wanted to be like Richard Gere at the end of An officer and a Gentleman and carry the blushing, Debra Winger of drawing out of that damned factory and  “away from all of this.” I had a plan too. I was going to embrace the aspects of creating images by hand that I really enjoyed and push them to their furthest logical conclusion. I love making large work, I love dense texture and I love brain-numbing repetition and, dear reader, as you already know, I dearly love bees.

Of note: my studio space was VERY small, roughly the size of a standard prison cell (I’m not even kidding). It had no windows. As I began to spend more and more time in this claustrophobic space, I descended into a kind of useful madness. I was alone in a very tiny room with no distractions and nothing but my work, how glorious! Things made sense that hadn’t made sense before and I was able to comfortably move slightly away from straight representation and make some visual connections that were slightly more surreal. This break allowed me the comfort to dig in and have fun with brain numbing repetition of form and desperately tedious texture work.

I began experimenting with making large, surreal, bee works on paper. I became deeply fascinated with the only obvious thing that humans and bees had in common physiologically: we both have hair! The drawings were made as large as I could manage given the size of the space. Since the longest wall was eight feet long, my drawings measured five feet high (the height of a roll of paper) by eight feet long. I worked on them standing, crouching and sitting cross-legged on the floor. I worked on them eight hours at a time; I developed carpal tunnel; I loved the hell out of it! Each drawing ended up taking about a hundred and fifty hours to complete and, miraculously, I liked how they looked so much that I stopped painting and really dug in to drawing.

These drawings are still an ongoing series called Corpus Melliferous. So far I’ve shown them at Artists' Quarter Gallery and Studios (remind me to post some time about putting on an exhibition by oneself), The Hub, and The Confederation Centre of the Arts. I’m hoping to find a venue to show more work from this series soon so you can see them in real life but until then here are the most recent pieces. Photo documented by the incredible Christina Arsenault.

53'' x 38'', graphite, watercolour-pencil and ink on paper

38'' x 53'', graphite, watercolour-pencil and ink on paper

Hive

Many thanks to Kylee Nunn, a brilliant local photographer, for the dreamy documentation of the installed piece.

I think we all, as creative people have our dream projects that given the opportunity, we simply must make. Hive is and was one of those projects for me. As I’ve mentioned before, art-making, at its core for me is creating an opportunity for others to see the world in a different way. Providing a situation of right-brain-strangeness and the subsequent dialogue about this strangeness is definitely one of the things that gives me the most pleasure in life.

Hive has been an idea at the back of my mind for the past four or five years. It would provide an all encompassing, overwhelming, full sensory experience for a broad public audience. The basic idea consisted of creating a large-scale installation where visitors would be given the opportunity to experience the darkness, warmth, sound, sights, smells and vibrations of a living beehive. As one small person with a lot of creative scope but with limited skills in the audio-visual world of sound and video projections this project had been just outside of my grasp but always on my mind.

Fast forward to last Winter when I had the great pleasure of getting to know Jeff Wheaton. The art world is a very small place, compound that reality a few times by the fact that Halifax is a tiny place and another few times by the fact that artists whose work obsesses particularly on bees are almost certainly bound to cross paths and there you have it, an inevitable collaboration! Jeff was the filmmaker in residence with the Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative. The film that he was creating for the residency was, non-coincidentally, also called Hive. This film is a gorgeous, gorgeous creation and features my bee taxidermy as part of the storyline. I strongly encourage you to check it out, but I digress. Turns out that Jeff and I had both been tapping into the bee ether and both wanted to make a large scale installation along similar lines and so we decided to join forces and create a piece for Nocturne Art at Night, 2013.

Through a lot of brainstorming over the next months we slowly came up with a workable concept for Hive.  The idea of a full sensory experience was at the core of each of our ideas, it was just exactly how this would take physical form that needed a little bit of smoothing out. As the naive dreamer I would wildly shoot out my ideas and Jeff , who knew what equipment and tools we would actually need to achieve our goals, would accurately point out that we “…weren’t Cirque de Soleil”.  In very short order we agreed on the idea that became Hive.  A large yurt, 28’ in diameter would make up the shell of our hive. We would then build a large cylinder that would occupy the centre of the inside of the yurt.  This cylinder would be constructed of organic cotton and wouId be fully impregnated with beeswax which, turns out, is a great surface to back-project video! Inside the cylinder three projectors would play original footage from Jeff’s backyard beehives (Did I mention that Jeff is an award winning cinematographer?) while several large speakers would pump out sound that was also recorded directly from these hives. The rest of the yurt would be blacked out so that the viewer’s full attention would be drawn to the centre and, we hoped, they would become lost in the experience.

Here's an arial shot from my balcony of Tim Tracey helping me out with the construction of the wax cylinder. Jason Goodyear also spent a good length of time helping me out with this project.  The cylinder was a bit of a monster  at twelve feet high and thirty feel long. Brushing and then ironing hot wax onto every inch of its surface was a bit of a back breaking task. You know who your friends are when they're willing to help you build your giant crazy art monolith. 

Here's a process shot of the cylinder set up in a big warehouse with Jeff for scale.  

So this is exactly what we ended up making and it existed as an installation for six hours on the night of October 19^th, 2013 in the Atlantic Filmmaker’s Cooperative parking lot at 5663 Cornwallis Street in North End Halifax. Jeff and I both donned beekeeping outfits and were present to “tend” our hive and field questions about it for the duration of the installation. Hundreds of people came out to see our strange beehive and we had many rewarding conversations with many of the hive’s temporary inhabitants.

A huge shout out of thanks to Martha Cooley and the staff, board and volunteers at the Atlantic Filmmaker's Cooperative who made this project possible through providing a venue, equipment, technical expertise and support.

I hope to recreate this project in a gallery setting or at a festival again soon. Ill keep you posted about this, oh yes!

Kreb

A year and a half ago I received an offer I simply could not refuse: would I like to be a collaborating artist on a stop motion animation project? The question came from my Centre for Art Tapes Scholarship Program mentor Tim Tracey who had won the Helen Hill award for animation for his proposed project Kreb. Kreb sounded like it was right up my alley: creatures and sets would be made exclusively from found and reclaimed materials and the subject matter would have a strong thematic and visual link to my bee taxidermy series, namely: the perversion of the natural world through technology, pollution and rampant industrialization.

What followed was a whirlwind of building, planning and crazy times. Sets were constructed out of discarded electronics, wires, hose, cogs and wheels and basically any gorgeous rusty old thing that suited the Kreb universe. This miniature world was unique, quirky, filthy and beautiful. Creatures were brainstormed and built using computer parts, wire, animal bones and any lovely detritus that we could find.  Chris Macnutt (Who is quite possibly the most patient human I have ever met.) put many hours into creating brilliant and stunning machines that turned and whirred in the background of every scene and added so much beauty and richness to all of the sets. Jason Johnson built the characters Kreb and The Baby. The hours I spent animating these tiny characters gave me a real sense of wonder at the painstaking detail that was put into them.  Tim Tracey, who conceived of and written the story  and who’s “baby” this project is, spent many hundreds of hours assembling the Kreb universe, building sets and creatures, animating, lighting and light painting and rallying us, his troops to battle! I worked on concept designs, built creatures, helped dress and light sets and worked on all of the small things in a literal sense: my specialty (in this project and in life) is in strange cyborg miniatures. I would be completely remiss if I didn't mention Joshua Van Tassel who wrote a gorgeous, wonderfully original and heavily industrial sounding soundtrack for Kreb; this soundtrack united all of the visual elements and set the emotional tone beautifully! There are many many other contributors to the planning and building stage including Ed Beals and Susan Tooke. Not the least of these contributors was Ami Goto who provided the warmth of her company and her incredible cooking and was always there to give helpful feedback as we worked. It was definitely a village-raised child of a quirky, endearing and simultaneously terrifying, miniature universe. And this is just mentioning the wonderful humans that I worked directly with!

(Anecdotally, I would be utterly remiss if I didn’t send a shout out to the Wu Tang Clan, specifically The 36 Chambers album. Without this album I fear I would have descended into total madness and I’m absolutely certain that the cumulative hours of dancing I did to Wu between takes prevented me from developing deep vein thrombosis and subsequently dying. Thanks Wu, I owe you my life!)

Finally, everything was assembled and we were ready to shoot!  For a staunch luddite like me, this part presented a serious learning curve. Each shot had to be painstakingly lit and each movement had to be carefully measured. The resultant images were stored in sequence on a series of laptops and hard drives and were then assembled into an animation through a specialized computer program.

Shooting became a sort of meditation: measure, move, take a picture, measure, move, take a picture. Turns out there’s a part of my lizard brain that loves this kind of desperate tedium. And so, day after day we would put sets together and light them and night after night we would carefully film our story, one move and one picture at a time.  If I hadn’t been excited about what we were making already, I became doubly so as our footage started to slowly assemble. I don’t think you really understand “slow” until your stop-animate at twenty-four frames/second. But the company was good and the work was very very satisfying. Martin Helmich came in as our director of photography at this point and the storytelling was pushed to exciting new limits because of his muti-dimentional re-imagining of the Kreb universe through the lens of the camera. Brett Hannam, a saintly man of many talents sat in on some of the insanity of our shoots and spent countless hours capturing footage, solving technical problems and eventually taking on the task of being the project’s producer.

The resultant film is a project that I am definitely very proud to have been able to play a role in creating. I’d love to show it to you but it’s still making the rounds at festivals. As soon as I can, I’ll post a link!

Here are the festivals where Kreb has played so far:

World premier: Atlantic Film Festival. September 2013, Halifax

Kreb received a special award for animation.

Outlier Film Festival, November 2013, Halifax 

First Glance Film Festival, April 2014, LA

Worldfest Independent Film Festival, April 2014, Texas

Kreb was awarded a Platinum Remi Award for animation.