The End of the Image, the Beginning of My Art Studio

My art studio was slightly cool, damp-smelling, and cobwebbed on a May day. I visited it from time to time, but my stays were short; I hadn’t been giving it the attention it deserved for a long while. I was making a living as a designer, and the thought of earning money from painting felt far away. My designer identity demanded too much of my time, effort, and presence.

I sat on the chair near the entrance, hoping not to get caught in a spider web. The light inside was not too bad, though far from ideal. The moment my spirits sank was when I noticed that the far corner, where I stacked my canvases, had fallen under the dominion of a giant spider. Would I really hand over the canvases I would labor on so diligently when I started again to them?

I thought, I’m clearly having a storage crisis here. Paper, for instance — its biggest enemy was the cold. There was no heater. In winter, the place was unusable. You couldn’t stay inside for more than fifteen minutes. I doubted whether the works I produced in summer could survive the winter here.

Still, I dreamed of days when I could spend as much time as I wanted creating again. I had been dreaming of this for more than ten years. The first step was to rent a place. At least my old art school materials and works had finally found a home.

When that day came, I wondered what kind of work I wanted to pursue. Most of the time, my body was not there, but my soul was wandering around the studio. I longed to be unconventional with both technique and surface. I saw that as freedom — regardless of what I painted.

Perhaps my distance from sterile and traditional forms metaphorically represented my own limitations. Perhaps I had to adapt to this cold, wild, and damp environment. Maybe what I lived through was what defined my art. As a woman, as an artist, perhaps what I felt was this impossible studio. Still, there had to be a way…

Even though my loved ones supported me, I was alone in this work. I knew how far they could come with me. After that, it was just me against the cold studio. The struggle was ongoing in every part of life.

I kept asking myself what my work meant in my own time. Should art be followed from books? What exactly was art right now — in this very moment — before everything changed again five minutes later? Like the clouds rushing over the roof, like the daylight shifting in the studio. That thought could open up an entire history of art: light and shadow, from the sacred light to the real light. But what about the sacred shadow — what to make of that?

Through the reflex of my designer identity, I first felt that what I showed mattered. Yet wasn’t it just as important how it felt, not only how it looked?

In a world where images were endlessly multiplied, did we really need another image? I thought it was more important to focus on how we feel. As an artist, I wanted to explore feelings.

To focus on what truly matters. Isn’t that what we really need? A single point in a vast space. One area. Among thousands of distractions.

Then I got up from my chair and left, ready to add new thoughts to the ones drifting in the air of the studio next time.

—

This cycle finally came to a happy ending two years later. By 2025, I had cleared my studio of spiders and could finally spend as much time there as I wanted.

Now, my dream is to have a bigger, warmer studio.