Some years ago, I was walking a winding gravel back road. Alone, headphones on, and hiking up a hill, I was happily listening to an artist interview. They kept mentioning ateliers.I stopped in my tracks.

I speak French; I know an atelier is a studio, but what were they talking about?

During the early aughts, while I was repeatedly wiping the trail of breast milk that ran along the wide pine floor planks of our bedroom to our pint-sized bathroom, a small movement was afoot in art education.

A handful of American graduates from the classical art training programs in Florence had returned to the U.S. and were offering a similar private instruction. This was an alternative to the North American politicized university art education. As I imagined it (and as I heard referenced elsewhere) your prof might well be outside having a smoke for much of the class, followed by scathing critiques of dubious merit.At the time my painting practice was my one sane thing. My emotional world was tender and I had no appetite for milieus I found disingenuous and expensive.

One artist of my generation said he’d survived his university art education by joining them. He taped a rubber duck to the wall and contrived an ironic theory to go with it. For this he was richly rewarded in marks and status. He wasn’t proud of it, just exhausted. It was a relief for me twenty years later to hear my quiet suspicions concretely discussed as shared knowledge.

In response to learning about the ateliers (and the school in Florence I also never went to) I bemoaned the loss of something that hadn't existed; an education that combined skill training and supported your individuality without bludgeons.

Critics of the atelier system complain about a deadness to graduates’ work. Some lament the lack of personal voice; the work is accurate, but one artist is indistinguishable from the next. A conveyor belt of flowers and boobs.

In my twenties I painted continuously, and sorely lacked language around what I wanted. I couldn’t have tolerated the atelier’s years of pencil and monochromatic work. I might have adored drawing plaster casts for the first two weeks, but would have had a tantrum in my third. Restraint is not my forte. Mixing colour, is my gasoline. Add to that my compunction to invent and eliminate elements from my compositions as I go.

I would have been crunched on the outside, angry on the inside.

***

Recently my husband Jake was referencing how differently our kids learned to read. Our son laboured his way through a sentence mechanically, word-by-word. Our daughter, by contrast, seemed to absorb the meaning of the sentence, unfazed by missing a word or two.

Phonetics vs whole language, (a subject that continues to fascinate Jake) reminded me of my own peripatetic work style. My life regret around my art education, or lack thereof, eclipsed an affection for my particular process. 

It exists for a reason; a nod to my proclivities was required.

Individuation seems a  lifelong event. Only you know where your need to get to; sometimes it is a paved road, sometimes bushwhacking. You carry your pack, maybe heavy with its doubts and hopes, look uphill through the forest to the elusive spot in your mind's eye which beckons.

You strategize around the obstacles you can see, and hope you are going in the right direction.