What I Learned from Artists

A year in apprenticeship

Anna Smedeby

Show me how you hold your pencil, says the sculptor.

I am taking individual classes with a retired art teacher. He has taught for years, decades, in different art academies in Belgium. Now he is 75, and has given up teaching. With one exception. Me. I am not entirely sure why he has made an exception for me, but here we are, in his workshop at the back of an art gallery, just on the edge of the forest. He sculpts in Ardennes bluestone, I am surrounded by his statues, a silent crowd watching me as I learn to draw. Sometimes I imagine them benevolent, sometimes critical. Some of them have their hands on their chins, looking pensive, but I am never sure what they are thinking. They dream inside their stone. And I try to fix my dreaming on a piece of paper.

God Almighty, says the sculptor, you can’t hold your pencil like that, squeezed tight in your hand. You have to hold it with your fingertips, lightly. Never forget that your pencil, like your charcoal or brush, is a prolongation of your hand, and your hand is a prolongation of your arm, and that should show in your trait.

He makes me draw standing up, always. I stand at a huge, ancient artist’s easel made of wood. I am surprised at how strongly he underlines the importance of the physicality of the exercise of drawing. It has to make you tired, your muscles should be tense, and that tension and the strain and the fatigue should be carried into your work of art. 

I am struck by the difference with my other work. The one I get paid for.

I work as a civil servant, in a large international organisation. We draft papers, reach consensual agreements, memoranda of understanding, sit through interminable meetings where we discuss (ever so politely) the exact wording of a bureaucratic text, which (let’s be honest about this) very few people will ever read. Actually, it would not matter if we didn’t have any bodies. Anything below the shoulders might as well not exist; our bodies are more trouble than anything else. They get tired, hungry, need breaks, need sleep, get sick... Our bodies are an unwelcome intrusion, an aberration in our rational world of ideas and words. We are proud of our ability to override our physicality. We play office politics. We worry about hierarchies and reorganisations. We hide behind legal paragraphs and always make sure we are covered against legal challenges.

In the atelier, there is nothing to hide behind. There is no jurisprudence, no hierarchy, no negotiation, no safety net. There is only you and a white paper. Your feet are on the floor, your hands dirty with charcoal. No one can tell you what to do. No one can help you. You face yourself.

It is unbelievably hard. I have many years of people-pleasing to work through.

Why are you being so nice all the time? he asks. 

BECAUSE IT IS ALL I KNOW HOW TO DO, I shout.

Good! Good! Use that energy in your drawing! Get angry! Forget about other people’s expectations. You absolutely cannot care about what others think. Not your parents, not your husband, not your children. Not even me. I see where the potential is, I see where you can go further, but I cannot tell you what you should do. Only you know. You must become deaf to others’ opinions. Sure, it feels nice if people like what you do, but that must never be the yardstick with which you measure your success.

Of course, he says, this means that you are never safe. Your work can never become routine. Every time you start a new drawing you start from zero.

He makes me do series of drawings on the same subject, to go deeper and deeper into the essence. I find myself looking at things in a totally different way. Familiar things suddenly become strange things. The dinner table after dinner, with dirty plates and half empty water glasses. The pavement outside our house. Tree roots. I bring things home from the forest and draw them. It is like I have switched on a new dimension in my vision. The world has taken on magical properties. Suddenly, the most mundane object becomes interesting. A spoon! A piece of cellophane! 

I meet other artists and talk to them about their practice. Though they are very different from each other, I have noticed that there are certain things they do which are the same. Things which often are quite different from what you do in an office.

They all underline the importance of time. It takes time to develop a theme or a thought. It takes many attempts: they call it ”research”, like they are scientists. It is experimentation, not failure. And they underline that it takes time and effort to develop your own style. There are no shortcuts, no ”best practice”. It takes years of experimentation and patience.

I guess that is why the artists I have met work all the time. They don’t take holidays from their art. They are always eager to get back into the atelier, and the atelier is a sacred space. The process of creation has to be kept safe from critical eyes. It is like the inside of an egg, crack it open before its time and the contents die. The sculptor refuses to let anyone see his unfinished drawings or sculptures. They are too fragile still. 

 At the same time, he is not dogmatic about the materials he uses. Everything is a potential art material: vegetable juice, asphalt, sandpaper, feathers. There are no limits. But even if the atelier looks like a mess, his tools are perfectly organised and in meticulous working order. Again, it is the same with them all. Everything is in its place, the pencils are sharpened, the brushes are clean. There is an almost ritualistic element to getting the tools ready, a beautiful sensuality in making sure the paper is hanging completely straight, checking the tension of the canvas, pouring out ink into a small container, mixing it with water, finding a rag of the right softness, sharpening the charcoal stick, gently, so it doesn’t break. There is a slowness and an attention to detail which soothes the soul, which brings you fully into the present, where all that exists is the gorgeous, thick, white paper, waiting for your touch.

One more thing.

All artists I have met have skeletons in their home or workshop. Human skulls, animal skeletons, stuffed animals, or all of the above. I asked my teacher the sculptor what he thought was the reason for this. He thought about it for a while.

Artists are trying to express what lies beneath. The structure underneath must always be in your work of art, even if it is not apparent. You must know what is inside, what is holding up the shape you are depicting. The hand starts at the shoulder, not at the wrist. A body may seem soft and yielding, but it is constructed around hard bones. You must know this and show it, yet without showing it.

But I think there is another thing about the skeletons. I think it shows artists have a different relationship with death than other people. They are not afraid of dead things; they are curious. They make drawings of their dead dogs, even of their dead family members. Death brings a different beauty, which is not to be avoided, but to be invited. Artists are intensely aware of the dance between the forces of life and death, Eros and Thanatos, and that both are necessary. 

Artists look straight at the void. Fearlessly. Tenderly.

My art is how I conjure death, says my friend the sculptor.

Stephen Hutchins, “Philippe”, Photograph, 1 March 2018.

What would it mean to take the death-awareness into the organisation? 

It’s funny, we talk about work-life balance, somehow implying we are not alive when we are at work. 

We have deadlines, not lifelines.  

Although we fill our work with “deadlines”, that does not mean death is present. Not for real. The institution is there to preserve things forever; it reeks of formaldehyde. But where there is no death, there is no real life either. We turn our backs on the void. 

But we cannot turn our backs on the knowing that the void is there. Paradoxically, the more energy you spend trying to avoid something, the bigger it grows, until it ends up dominating you, eating you up. 

Artists do not talk about work-life balance. They are alive, and are not balancing interests. Art goes first. Full stop. They work all the time; they are fully alive all the time.

What would it mean to be fully alive in the office?

I go to work, which means I sit in front of a computer screen. I have not met my colleagues for months. I often get a feeling that none of this is real. Like we are in a film. Like we are ghosts. Martin Shaw says we are in the Underworld and haven’t realised it yet. I think he is right. We keep doing the same things and having the same conversations as if though nothing has changed. Everyone is talking about getting back to normal. Just like nothing happened. We are in the middle of a pandemic, and still we cannot allow ourselves to talk about death.

What would happen if we did?

What would happen if we acknowledged that we have no idea what we are heading into? That going back to normal is no longer an option? That it hasn’t been for years? 

To be alive means that you are going to die. Every moment of your life you are getting closer to your own death. To understand this is to understand the secret of life. To be able to be truly alive. 

And that is what the artists understand. Life is not here to be suspended and prolonged, stretched out as far as possible. Measured out with coffee spoons, the poet says. Life is here to be praised, drunk in large gulps. An institution cannot conceive of its own death. Yet it is there. It will come. And rather than maintain life at all cost, and resist change at all cost, it behooves us to live and act in the knowledge that soon, we will no longer exist, and that knowledge should spur us to try to achieve the absolute maximum of what we can, now, this moment, this breath.

I stand at the easel. To conceive of a way of sitting in front of the screen of my work laptop which is the same as the way I stand at the easel. To bring the courage of creation and the awareness of death to the office of the bureaucracy in which I spend so much of my time.

We work with climate change. Perhaps we all need to bring a skull to work, to remind ourselves that there are ghosts in our carpeted corridors, though we do not see them. Ghosts of animals burned in forest fires, ghosts from drowned cities, ghosts of the waves which soon may engulf us. Our sanitized surroundings cannot admit the thought that we are at the end of the world as we know it. But the artists know. Every one of them can hear the earth crying out. To bring that awareness to the office is to wear two faces. Grief-stricken and calm; bleeding and rationally efficient. Embodied; disembodied. Bridging the divide. Alive in the awareness of our death. Yes. And because I know my time is short, I have no time to waste.

I stand at the easel. I hold in my body the fire, the water, the forest, the sky.

I raise my hand to the eagerly waiting paper.

Anna is European, based in Belgium, a war-torn territory which has been fought over for millennia. Her belief in peace and democracy has led her to work in international organisations for many years, as a trainer, facilitator, HR strategist and change agent. She is a choir leader and climate activist, drawn to art like a moth to the light, and until two months ago had no literary ambitions whatsoever.

Stephen Hutchins (ARPS - Associate, Royal Photographic Society) specialises in fine art, monographic, photographs, with particular emphasis on the natural world. https://stevehutchins.smugmug.com