At first, when you unlock the studio door, when you pull out the brushes or the charcoal or whatever the hell you’re working with that day, it’s packed in there. Every single person you’ve ever known is crammed into that space with you. Your first music teacher who said you had potential but lacked discipline, that pretentious bastard. That friend who makes blockbuster films while you can barely upload a video onto YouTube. The entire art world, the galleries, the collectors, the other artists whose shows you pretend not to care about while secretly wanting to burn their studios down, all of them standing there, judging. And your own ideas about the work, about what you think you’re making, what it’s supposed to say, they’re there too, the loudest motherfuckers in the room.
But you keep showing up. You keep making marks and scraping them off and making them again, because what else are you going to do? This is the gig. And slowly, so slowly you don’t even notice at first, they start to leave. Your teacher walks out. Your friend splits. Even the art world gets bored and wanders off to the next shiny thing. The concept you came in with, the one you were so certain about? It dissolves like it was never there at all.
And then it’s just you. Alone with the mess and the light coming through the window and the quiet, that beautiful, terrifying quiet.
And if you’re very very lucky, if you’ve earned it, if you’ve put in the time and didn’t quit when it got ugly and painful, eventually even you leave. There’s just the work. Nothing else.
And maybe, if the universe is smiling, that’s enough.