Stepping into the Timothy Dwight Art Studio for a Friday evening vision board workshop, I was greeted with warm lights, familiar faces, and the gentle hum of indie music. Scrapbook paper, sticker letters, and magazines lay chaotically scattered across counters and tables, while the walls were graced with an array of student artwork. I found myself admiring the charcoal drawings featuring bodies posed in relaxed, slouched positions, a painted study of Velázquez’s Juan de Pareja portrait, and a painting of a swan drifting through a sapphire lake, its bright orange beak a vivid contrast against the deep blue water. But what truly caught my attention was “Mom’s Fridge”. “Mom’s Fridge” was smothered with works of art created by those who neither wanted to take their pieces home nor bear to throw them away.
I sat down to begin my collage, cutting up and arranging the materials before me. Lost in the meditative process of experimenting with color, texture, and shape, I nearly missed dinner at the dining hall, working well past the workshop’s end time. As the scissors cut into the crevices of the intricately unusual shapes that comprised my collage, my hyperfocus wrapped me in an illusion of frozen time. It was the first time in a year that creating art brought me genuine peace and joy.
In high school, art had been stripped of its magic—I was never given the luxury of simply playing with creativity. Instead, each piece was created under the pressure of grades or commerce. The art classes, teaching techniques I’d long mastered, trapped me in a monotonous routine of rushing through assignments week after week until the work lost all meaning. One day, I surrendered to an art block that seemed to curse me into oblivion.
The vision board workshop rejuvenated my creativity, and I found myself unable to stay away from the studio. This led me to a Paint and Sip Duty Night, where I embarked on a more ambitious collage than that of the vision board workshop. The piece began as a simple drawing of an eye with the moon as its iris, but as I spent more time in the studio, the illustration transformed into another collage. Spider legs emerged as eyelashes, four ghostly figures began haunting the edges of the blue construction paper, and along the bottom, the page whispers, “The Dead Shall Be Raised. (It got spooky).” Having such a variety of supplies at my disposal opened creative doors that I never knew existed. Yet again, I lost myself in the creative process for four hours, finally dragging myself away at 3 AM, but not before discovering a new artistic freedom I hadn’t experienced since childhood.
Now, when I walk into the art studio, I know that the laws of time and space will be defied. You can track time’s passage through the small windows near the ceiling, watching the daylight fade into dusk, but beyond that and the occasional glance at your phone, time becomes delightfully fluid. I prefer it this way—the illusion of frozen time halts my racing thoughts that usually send my mind into overdrive.
With 24/7 access to Timothy Dwight’s art studio, my creativity has been gloriously reawakened. The stagnancy that once plagued my artistic development has transformed into a flowing well of ideas, all because I finally found a space that welcomes my approach to art. The warm atmosphere, coupled with its controlled chaos, creates the perfect environment for my creativity to flourish. Never would I have imagined falling so deeply in love with the artistic process as I have in this past month.
