If isolation tempers the strong, it is the stumbling-block of the uncertain.
–Paul Cezanne
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I spend a lot of time alone in the isolation of my studio. Fortunately for me, it is the place in the world where I am most comfortable and feel completely myself.
It is the place where I can feel unrestrained to free the mind and go wherever it takes me. The place where I can shed the uncertainty I find in the outer world and feel free to daydream. The place where I can summon up pictures that exist only inside myself. A place to study. To listen. To see.
It is my my university, my library, my theatre, my monastery and my place of refuge.
My haven.
When I am out of the studio, I am all the while trying to get back to it.
When others come into my studio, the dynamic of that place changes and I feel myself suddenly self-conscious and a bit uncomfortable, like I am standing in someone else’s home.
The visitors’ eyes become my eyes and I notice things I never see on a day to day basis. The cat hair on the floor that needs to be swept up. The paint splatters on the wall or a fingerprint in paint on the wall switchplate. The windows that need cleaning. The piles of papers that I have been meaning to go through for too many months. The paintbrushes soaking in murky water scattered throughout the place or the start of a not-too-good painting that will most likely never see the outer world.
In that moment, my perfect castle of isolation becomes a hovel of uncertainty.
But the castle remarkably reappears once I am alone again. The uncertainty recedes and I begin to feel myself once more.
My isolation is my default state of being.
I understand exactly what Cezanne is saying at the top. I have been more comfortable alone than in the company of others since I was a child. I don’t know if that is a strength or just a neurotic peccadillo. But I know that if I ever find uncertainty in my isolation, I will have lost my footing in this world.
But, thankfully, that hasn’t happened yet…
Redtree Times 