My Allerton Artist-in-Residence Diaries Week 2
It’s been such a busy time here that it’s difficult to know where to begin this week’s diary entry. It’s really been more than a week since I last wrote, of course, and in that time, the first few warm days—when it was still possible to ride my bike around comfortably—have given way to the coldest cold stretch of the year so far. Winter snow now begins to fall, and I’ve had to stow the bike away in the hallway by the A-frame entrance. Somehow that simple act, of sliding it in against the wall, makes the season’s turn feel more final. Those early warmer days were a gift. I’d ride through the grounds, along the edge of the gardens and out past the park’s periphery, where everything begins to blur into forests and field. It’s a good way to get oriented—to feel the slope of the place, how it moves from the sculpted and ornamental into the rough and unkempt. When the cold finally came, it also meant I could turn inward, unpack the last of my supplies, and start to lay out the studio in a more deliberate way. I get all my materials out of their bags and begin tacking up the precursor drawings—the studies for future oil paintings. Lining them up together, I start thinking about their lineage, how the marks shift over time, how each one opens into a slightly different vocabulary of gesture. That process of re-seeing, of noticing changes across the drawings, helps me acclimate. It’s the way I get comfortable in a space: by surrounding myself with traces of where I’ve been.
My Allerton Artist-in-Residence Diaries Week 1
I’m driving to Allerton Park and Retreat Center to serve as the Joan and Peter Hood Artist in Residence for the next three weeks, window down and relatively sunny as the seasons are starting to change. It took about ten trips up and down three flights of stairs to carry all the gear and necessities to the car. I have a pretty decent playbook for how this whole thing can go drafted in agendas and in my head, but also don’t want it to be predictable, I want indeterminacy, I want things to go off script. How does this work? Can we intentionally hunt for surprise? I think so. I’m bringing non-studio work with me, and it kicks into high gear on day one, so the first three days are busy, almost too busy. But when I arrive the night before I have this feeling of knowing I can surprise myself, and pull into the parking lot next to the A-frame building I’m moving into as it’s being circled by deer, moving in the darkness, just outside the periphery of the light, sniffing the ground. I come trundling in hoisting bags of stuff, and raccoons scuttle off under the fence-lines. There’s clearly a lot of life here, though it feels encapsulated in darkness. The ride in, you get this immediate sense you’re in a sphere of light created by the car’s headlamps and you’re moving as a single lighted figure through this landscape of darkness all around, which is simultaneously descending earlier and earlier in the day. It’s getting sharply colder. Then: that first feeling of arriving, of stepping out from that sphere and out again into the dark, sort of sets the tone for being here — it’s like you’re surrounded by this other life that keeps its own hours and you’re just passing through.