Chaos + Clutter + Change = Beauty: A Study of the Artist’s Creative Space

An artist’s creative space informs their process greatly. (Here, “artist” refers to anyone who works in visual, literary, culinary, or performing arts, or any similar expressive craft.) Michel de Montaigne, the highly influential French essayist, provided an example of this in action. Montaigne had quotes from classical writers and philosophers, as well as from the Bible, painted onto wooden beams in his library’s ceiling, so that when he needed inspiration, all he had to do was observe the room around him (see A. A. Balkema’s Les Inscriptions dans la bibliothèque de Montaigne).

This final project for The Materials of History, Thought, and Art presents a collection of the creative spaces of students and one professor at SUNY New Paltz. They were asked to describe and reflect on their spaces and their creative processes within their spaces. In each artist’s section of this project, their space is represented in two ways: as a collage and through a collection of photographs. The collages, made up of keywords from the artists’ interviews, convey how they perceive and experience working in their own spaces. The photographs of their spaces are unedited and unpolished, the intention being to reflect how creativity is rarely neat and clean, as well as to emphasize that disorder (present in some form in the majority of these spaces) is valuable. In this same vein, Balkema describes Montaigne’s space as ever-changing: from time to time Montaigne had quotes switched out for others—all part of the constant but messy evolution of the artist’s space that, in the end, benefits their creative process (Balkema 8).

William Rodriguez
Sculptor