An Artist's Atmosphere

Your atmosphere isn’t just your atmosphere. It’s not just a room, a house, or an office. An atmosphere, especially for an artist, is a place where ideas grow, evolve, and become what you want them to be, and what they can be. Your environment is the place where you create, and what’s more important to the act of creation than a place that can inspire?

What you surround yourself with will be what inspires you the most, and if it’s not, there are easy ways to be able to create a space that suits you.

First of all, what is your home, your room, your office, or other place of work and living, but a place where you do your work? If there are white walls everywhere, and beige, how is the purity of nothingness going to enhance what you are doing? It’s not. Your work will echo wherever you are, and wherever you are will paint the work you’re creating. If your creations are a part of your personality, then the places you keep and put yourself are a part of your personality, too. Whether you create a home, or create a recipe, your personality shapes your surroundings, and we’re told not to let it.

Why not?

Why are we constantly told that art comes from what’s inside and not from what is around us and what we surround ourselves with? If we surround ourselves with blank nothingness, then won’t that affect what is inside? How does what we interact with on a daily basis not affect those parts of us that create? Everything we interact with creates what we are and what we do. The more we have to interact with, what is tangible in our surroundings, every piece of art we look at, gives us the spirit in order to create.

If we want to have a fuller spirit, we must surround ourselves with what we love, and fill our lives with art, books, food, drinks, home decor, jewelry, and etcetera that inspires our art. Filling our lives with inspiration will inspire what we create, so fill your life with what you love. It’s the outer things, those choices that make who we are — what we want to eat, what we want to wear — that show the most in our work.

Yes, everything can inspire, but your work will echo who you are the most. This means that whatever you fill your life with will inspire your work the most, so why not fill your life with what you love?

Get books of your favorite artists’s work, tear it out of those books, and hang those works around your house. 

Find a nice blanket that is the right thickness and weight, and use as a tablecloth for a side table.

Meander around inexpensive websites, or around consignment shops, and grab whatever you can afford that screams, “TAKE ME HOME WITH YOU.” 

Texturize walls by pinning fake flowers or dried flowers to them, along with fabric, or ribbon.

Use packing materials, such as brown paper, to create poofs on the walls with a little bit of tape or a few thumbtacks.

There are so many ways to update your space, whether you have money or not. As someone who is a perpetually broke artist, most of the ways I’ve been able to create my own space have had to be creatively inexpensive. 

Building your own environment will build your art. The more inspiration you surround yourself with, the more you will be inspired. Creating your space will create creativity in your work. Whoever you are, when your space is your space, will echo in what you do because what you see everyday is whatever environment you choose to exist in. 

It’s the wallpaper on your phone, it’s the window curtains you open everyday when you wake up in the morning, it’s the waste basket crumpled up bits of work get thrown into, it’s the welcome mat at your front door, and every other decorated object you see every day, even what we might take for granted or have forgotten was there.

Allowing yourself to create and build your own space will help to create and build who you are, and you are your art. If you are what you create, that means you are your surroundings.

Do you want to continue to be beige?