Starting over

Some of you may know about the fire that ripped through the building that housed my art studio. This was a month ago – almost to the day – and I lost pretty much everything to do with my art practice.  The only thing I didn’t lose, thank goodness, were the artworks that I was transferring from the Continuum@Oxo show to the Queens Park Open Gardens and Studios, which were, thankfully, safely stored at home between shows.

I had in fact just finished setting up for the Queens Park event when I picked up the email :  Important Update about the fire….

At this stage I had no idea that there had even been a fire and as I read the email, I had that experience of not quite believing what I was reading. That the building had burnt down on Thursday night, that it took 9 hours to put out the fire, and that most studios had been destroyed.  The building was unsafe so please don’t come to the site.  And so on it went.

I was relieved that no-one had been hurt.  But selfishly I also started to consider how much I had lost.  As I live in Central London and space is of a premium, I had outsourced pretty much everything to do with my art practice to that space.  It had all my materials, finished works, storage, daylight lamps, works in progress, bits of stuff I had collected in the four years that I had been up there for mark making etc, reference books, course work from Newlyn School of Art.  The material value was one thing  - the ideas, the work, the stuff that I had collected was something else all together.

I know myself well enough to know two things.  One is that I can emotionally swing into a pretty dark place when things go wrong.  So of course I decided that this was the end, that art was no longer for me, etc.  That I could never recover what I had lost.  But I also know that I am pretty resilient and so in the ups that occurred over the following weeks, I started to think about different ways I could work. 

I figured that the chance of finding a new private space within my price bracket in Central London was pretty slim so I thought about shared spaces.  I thought about just painting outdoors for the summer, and forgetting about finding a space until the winter.  I thought about going back to painting in the living room, and not worrying about the mess that creates (that’s a tough one).  I had friends suggest that I just don’t worry about it for now and pick it up later.  But I couldn’t sit comfortably with the idea of doing nothing.  It’s just not how I operate.

The idea of a shared space prompted me to look into an ad I kept seeing on social media.  It looked amazing, but I wasn’t sure if it would really be ‘me’. The usual internal chatter – oh they’ll be young, and proper artists, and so on.  But the pragmatic voice in my head said ‘oh just go and check it out’ so I did. And I loved what I saw, and signed up immediately.

I’ve gone from having a small studio full of stuff to a small locker with a few bits and pieces.  I’m yet to replace my oil paints, although a good friend kindly gave me his old acrylic set he no longer uses, and some lovely local artists have gifted me their cast off brushes. These small acts of kindness and consideration mean so much.  I’m not in a rush to replace to what I had.  It’s been an interesting exercise to write down everything that was in the studio – closing my eyes and facing different directions to try and remember – and then challenging myself to hone in on the stuff I used most. It will take a while to replace that stuff, but I’m not in a hurry.  In a way, having a little haven to come to once or twice a week feels like the first step.  I will get there.

And what comes next?  Who knows. Watch this space.