Hoboken Atelier: The Evolution of Abstract Experimentalism
I started abstract painting when the left side of my brain was trying to hijack my mind, the right side of my brain screaming for help!!! I’ve always loved a good challenge, and if going to law school wasn’t challenging enough, for my last year, I wanted to see how I would manage going to law school full-time and also working professionally full-time. While I may have been succeeding at work and in my studies, eventually, I started to feel my creative mind atrophy.
One day, I cleared out my home office, went to the art supply store and set up an art studio in my apartment. Just like that, I was now a researcher-bioethicist-law student-(dare I say) artist??? That room became my sanctuary. Whenever things got heavy- I would go in the studio, turn off the monkey mind and get lost in an artistic meditation. Little did I know that this so-called process would completely change my entire life.
In the studio, I came face-to-face with all my darkest thoughts and insecurities. What started out as a cathartic escape from the day-to-day turned into a real mind-f*ck! All my subconscious thoughts exorcised unto the canvas – staring back at me. Not as a specific image, but rather an abstraction of the internal struggles that had danced in my mind during the process, and not all that different from what I came to learn I was suppressing in my everyday life.
With no formal training in the arts, the entire process was an intuitive experiment- not just in the art itself, but also in the tango going on between the intuitive mind and the ever-present ego. Unlike say writing, where the delete button magically transforms the page to a tabula rasa. In painting every decision remains on the canvas – no matter how many times you cover it up – the artist always knows what lies beneath. Every misstep stares back at you – the intuitive mind daring greatly and the ego taunting back.
Art forced me to accept what seemed like mistakes and transform them into lessons. Thus was birthed Abstract Experimentalism, an abstracted compromise between the intuitive mind (stream of consciousness) and the ego. A process, which is as much mindset as it is art. This process quickly seeped outside the studio and become a way of life!
Since, I’ve graduated from law school and expanded the tiny studio in my home-office to the 400 square-foot Hoboken Atelier. The studio serves as an artistic Zendo and creative laboratory for self-awareness and personal transformation.
My life is the experiment, my art the data!