On the bus

Some weeks ago I went to New York City with my son.

We landed early on the Wednesday, dropped our things at the hotel, and then made straight for the museum around the corner that was having a show of Wangechi Mutu’s work – a woman whose collages I’d long admired online.

But OMG, the show was so much more than what I knew, and so much more than I expected… the early collages, but later paint-collages, sculptures and short films and installations – several floors of a lush, dynamite, gorgeous and frequently creepy body of work – a highly coherent and full retrospective of an artist in mid-career.

On the Thursday we had a lunch date with V, who I had never met in person, but knew from some online art classes and group critiques, from 2 years of regular zoom meetings hosted by our mutual teacher, Lisa Call.

And at some point there over lunch with V, talking about art and bodies of work, both she and I tried to explain the Helsinki bus theory to my son – a theory Lisa introduced to us early on in her classes, as a way to focus on one’s own path for long enough to get to a point of deep creative exploration and originality. We stumbled through our explanations, looking for how to say that if you stay on your one single bus long enough instead of trying each and every new thing, it will start to evolve into something that is original.

And once you start to see that difference in your work from the work you so admire—that’s why you chose that platform after all—it’s time to look for your breakthrough. Suddenly your work starts to get noticed. Now you are working more on your own, making more of the difference between your work and what influenced it. Your vision takes off.”

Arno Rafael Minkkinen

Lisa had us consider this way of thinking early on in our work with her, along with a process of what she called “closing doors” – closing the doors to all the things you are NOT going to do, so that you can focus on what you ARE going to do. And in a way, the narrower, the better – challenging, but also a clearing of the dross.

So looking at the work of Wangechi Mutu, it was so clear she had stayed on her bus – but the interesting thing was, that her materials were able to change quite radically through the years, and it was her thematics that stayed true and focused like a north star throughout.