The Elephant in the Studio - Introduction

A cross stich made by my mother, Helen Brown, that hangs over the door of my studio

This story begins in the mid-1990's in the lower church of St. Patrick's off Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia. I am in my late 20s, writing, painting, and trying to figure out how to complete the transition from adolescence to adulthood that higher education alone had not achieved.

In the pre-mass quiet, I try to clear my mind. This has always been my habit and from time to time, things come unbidden to mind and I am inclined to see them as important issues who have been waiting for a moment to speak up over the din of my day-to-day concerns.

On that morning, clear as a bell, the sentence, "I want my work to be more like prayer" came to mind.

At the time, I didn't know what it meant, if it was a realistic goal, or how I would achieve it. I just knew that it explained something - it clarified that I was unhappy with what I was doing and suggested a template for action that would be more satisfying.*

I didn't know it at the time, but this realization set in motion a number of changes that have led me to my current work. It provided rules against which I could measure an idea's value. It gave me a kind of purpose that painting didn't have before.

I have wanted to write about this for a long time, but have been reluctant to do so. For all of its professed openness, the art world is a rigidly secularized field and it welcomes discussions of spirituality more generously than attempts to talk about organized religion. 'Iconoclasm' remains one of its bywords, and I expect that merely mentioning prayer will cause some people to distrust anything that follows. Also, having taken on the mantel of research, art and design have put even more distance between themselves and their roots in religions expression. Modernism's great project was to free art from the political and religious functions that it fulfilled for centuries. I am not alone in wondering what it should do with its freedom.

So, to some degree it has seemed hazardous to bring up the subject, however much it haunts my thinking (and, I must admit, my teaching). But on my current sabbatical (a word with a religions past...), I feel compelled to engage it - and to invite others to talk about the ways they frame creative work in their own minds. For too long this has been the elephant in the studio, and now it's time to name it and start trying to figure it out.

So, over the next eight weeks (each Saturday), I will post essays on the subject of prayer and studio work. We'll look at the fashionable use of the word 'practice' to describe what we do in the studio, we'll talk about various forms and objectives of prayer, about the relation of physical objects to the spiritual world, and a few other topics. I invite comments and discussion on this, and hope that giving the subject some boundaries helps structure it and provides points of entry for others.

* Realizing that this may sound surprising to some people who know my work and who might think I've invented a new concern for myself, I want to point to my first attempt to deal with this issue, the 1998 exhibit Articles of Faith I organized for the Philadelphia Art Alliance. That was a confused and problematic exhibit - but I don't regret either of those aspects of it. Generating problems and looking for hidden connections between things are important tasks, and hopefully I have gotten a little better at them over time.