Nepal Residency Art
A few paintings. Also, I seem to have beaten Post-Residency Crash Syndrome.
I might have ended up as a mental health casualty of 2020 anyway,1 but it didn’t help that I had been spiraling downward after my 2019 Fulbright in Austria. The residency itself was amazing, and I continue to be proud of the project I did there. That it was reported on by Nina MacLaughlin at The Boston Globe was a lovely bonus. The Fulbright/Q21-MuseumsQuartier Artist-in-Residence in Vienna is no longer being offered; that makes me one of fifteen people on the planet upon whom it was ever conferred. It was the opportunity of a lifetime. But I am prone to post-residency crashes. The proverbial party ends (sometimes, actual parties end too), and I rethink my entire art practice until I’m miserable. It doesn’t always happen, or I’d stop doing them. But the episode after Vienna was bad. This is probably the closest thing I have to a neurosis.
With the benefit of hindsight, I see that the post-residency crash is a specialized form of perfectionism. In my case, I sometimes completed residencies and started working on projects intended to surpass what I accomplished during the residency. Unfortunately, I also returned to life obligations and the unsung grind of the studio. In Vienna, I lived upstairs from the Leopold Museum; at one point, my face was on a promotional poster around the MuseumsQuartier. The institutions involved were paying me for that. They granted me so much creative freedom that I could have spent two months drinking cappuccinos and eating Linzertorte, and there would have been no organizational consequences. The idea that I could get the same kind of work done back in America was not a reasonable expectation, and I spent months failing it instead of adjusting my expectations.
I bring it up for two reasons. One, if you experience something like that—the post-residency crash, the post-exhibition crash, or similar—you’re not alone, and there may be a cure ready at hand: consider whether your ambitions are sensible. Two, I note with relief that after I returned from the Manang Artist Residency in late April, I was fine. I felt good about my creative track and I was ready to keep marching upon it. I came back with a dozen pencil drawings and three gouaches, having finished some New Hampshire ideas and started Nepal images. Now home, I’m working on the converse, developing Nepal images and starting New Hampshire ones.
This has been a long time coming. I reviewed a 2022 exhibition of Alex Katz at Colby College in which I meditated on the validity of Katz’s project. I didn’t write this, but I thought it, and returned to the thought repeatedly after: If what Katz is doing with modernist figuration is not a disaster, then what I’m doing with modernist figuration is valid as fuck. I just need to keep making the stuff. So I went to Nepal inoculated against Hepatitis A, Typhoid, and crippling self-doubt. I’m happy to report that I returned with none of the above.
The drawings told me that they don’t want to be shown yet, but here are the gouaches. The first is a New Hampshire image. The other two hail from Kathmandu and Ngawal.
The old saw says that the journey is more important than the destination. Looked at another way, the journey consists entirely of destinations. I’m grateful to have discovered that in what I hope is still mid-career. I have a lot more paintings to make.
Dissident Muse Journal is the blog of Dissident Muse, a publishing and exhibition project by Franklin Einspruch. Content at DMJ is free, but paid subscribers keep it coming. Please consider becoming one yourself, and thank you for reading.
2020 started with Covid. That summer saw the Fiery But Mostly Peaceful Protests™ that I suspected at the time were precursors to the current descent of progressive politics into violent antisemitism, having stated Einspruch’s Iron Law of Identitarianism the prior fall. In October, I had to say goodbye to a truly great cat from outdoors in the rain, through the window of the veterinarian’s examination room, due to Covid precautions that turned out to be ill-founded. In November, Matthew Teitelbaum and Kaywin Feldman, the invertebrates running the MFA Boston and the National Gallery, respectively, canceled Philip Guston, thus situating the Jewish artist ambiguously and negatively with respect to so-called antiracism in a manner that was applied to Jewish artists in general after October 7, 2023.
The Mangal Bazaar painting is on fire 🔥 congrats!
As for Katz, he might as well prove useful, so it's good you found him so. I'm not partial to his shtick, but it's not a disaster; his career certainly wasn't. Everyone does what he can, basically.