My first friendship was an art friendship.
As kindergarteners, my first true friend and I would kneel together at the low coffee table and fill reams of printer paper with sketches. We’d give ourselves a prompt, and then both draw in response. A princess, usually.1 We’d bicker over each other’s artistic choices; she was bold, her figures swarming with features in crazy proportions while I was conservative, my two-dimensional people stiff and simpering. But even so, we lived in the same imaginative universe. We co-wrote dramas in our make-believe play, sometimes corralling our siblings to fill out the cast of characters, and sometimes banishing them when we needed to really focus on our craft.
Our imaginations wove in and out of each other’s in a synchronized swim. We were playing, but we were also learning, together, the uses and limits of these brains in our heads – acclimating to the inhale and exhale of process, the restlessness of working out an idea, the sweaty frustration when the thing wouldn’t work, the thrum of creative energy that lived in our bodies. We were training each other, just by nature of being children together who shared the same imaginative hunger.
When she moved away around second grade, we transitioned to the written form: letters scrawled on our respective floral stationery, heavy on the weather and light on plot.
But even when she was gone, that first friend left me with a deep-seated truth about myself: that my favorite intimacy with another person was to make things side by side.
While much of the work of artmaking is solitary—I sew pants and piece quilts mostly alone in my apartment’s extra bedroom. I write on my laptop on my couch or, sometimes, in a cafe—support and kinship with other artists keeps me going. It is as crucial as time alone, as physical space to work, as the stimulation of taking in art that I love – all part of the scaffolding that supports my creativity.
I have not yet fallen out of love with our original driving question: how do you create a home in which art can survive? I make a home where are can survive because I recruit people to help me.
In the logistical spirit of Circling, how does this practically happen? How do you create it? How has it looked, for example, this week?