THE ARTIST & ALTAR IN THE STUDIO

Whether you’re an artist, massage therapist, yoga practitioner, writer, or whatever, it helps to have a studio, even if it’s just a desk in a corner of a room.  Interesting the root word for studio comes from “(s)teu – meaning “to push, stick, knock, beat.”  This implies action, not just a space.  One can picture the artist pushing themselves to go deeper, to “stick” the essence of what they’re after, to knock and wait for answers, to beat like a shaman calling for partnership with the cosmos, beating for the sake of world resonance and healing.

On the desk in my home studio, I have a mini-altar that has all these  objects:  a shard of wood from the last house that Blind Willie Johnson lived in, three tiny sea shells from Costa Rica, a three-segmented stone from a Tibetan ritual object, a Jesus keychain/flashlight, two tiny metal ships, the shed skin of a cicada, a little donkey, a sprig of leaves and red berries, resting on packets of colored sand from a mandala, a ½” leaping cat, a little orange and white spinning top, a sculpture of Shiva dancing, a vial with homeopathic crystals, a marble, an acorn, a Tibetan prayer wheel scroll, a ¼’ Buddha, and a coconut plectrum to play the North Indian sarod.

All of that on surface that’s about 6” wide and 4” deep!

During the quarantine, I’ve had time to get into books that have been in my library for years.  Lately I’ve begun each morning by reading about one artist and studio each day, captured beautifully in “The Artist In His Studio” by Alexander Liberman.  I must’ve bought it 40 years ago. (Happy to see you can still get the paperback - order it from your local bookstore!)  In it you can see the actual studios that were the self-created sanctuaries and sites for their paintings.  Cezanne, Monet, Renoir, Bonnard, Matisse, Picasso, Chagall, Kandinsky, Duchamp, Dali, Miró, Derain, Giacometti, Sonia Delaunay and others – it’s a treasure trove of residences for soulful work.

These residences all act as “memory palaces”.  And, whether it’s your massage room, painting studio, or yoga practice space, we need at least a few objects or images and lots of empty space to help us and our subjects transcend everyday reality and become windows into the wider world of spirit, soul and body, where we can inhabit a deeper kind of sanity to confer the deeper kind of meaning to life.

my studio “altar”