Life is Art School
Last week I revisited one of my favorite Netflix documentary series called Abstract: The Art of Design. I go back and I watch Ilse Crawford’s episode if I ever just want to feel like someone gets it. Don’t we sometimes need to feel like someone else gets it?
Ilse’s expertise in the world of design is interiors, but her deeper work is to craft an experience of comfort and care -- like human engineering on the emotional side of things. How will a person bogged down by life feel upon entering this place? Upon staying? Upon leaving? Hopefully better, right? Even if they can’t consciously articulate why.
It may have been the gold sconces that shimmer on the edge of an east-facing window or the way a silk throw seems silkier against the scratchiness of a jute rug beneath our feet, because materials are best felt in the context of their opposite. A thoughtful designer infuses these soft decisions with his full attention and intention, but the point isn’t for us to notice them. The point is for us to be there pleasantly, to fit effortlessly, and that’s all. Expensive furniture falls flat if a person can’t properly engage with your space.
I’ve been thinking so much about the spaces we take up -- here online and otherwise. How volatile and heavy and uncomfortable some can be. How rooms designed in hurry and haste can’t hold within their walls sustainable peace. Wallpaper’s coming up at the corners, no one can hear above the music, and guests go home feeling empty and tired.
I don’t want that. As a believer in a reclaimed Christian space, I can’t afford that. I want to share nourishing meals with the people who visit, and I want my table to have relatively small dimensions. Ilse says, “What’s interesting about tables is that they can be metaphors of power and confrontation. The conference table is typically wide and long and the one at the top is the one who pulls the strings. The informal table, for me, is a more lovely thing. It’s actually narrow enough to have a conversation quite comfortably. Design that encourages people to be close together is a good thing.”
Our systemic wellbeing depends on us loving each other despite our uncomfortable closeness. We all want to ask our questions and be asked our questions back. Our deep, unrelenting connection to truth is going to mean interrogating someone else’s findings and then meeting them with a hearing ear. Humanity is there hanging expertly in the balance between dialogue and empathy -- because dialogue without empathy leads to strife and empathy without dialogue is just a kind of pithy ignorance. We need places that offer both conviction and kindness, exploration and ease. Who of us will toe that line?
Hanging in her studio is a print that says, “An art school has to be a mixture of a monastery, a pub, and a sweatshop.” I thought, yes! This is it! Life is art school. There will be prayer and booze and poor working conditions and people just need a place to take off their shoes. And if one wanders in to mine all hot and bothered to find they fit right safely in, I think I’ll have enriched another flat and fallowed space.