My science fiction geekdom will come as no surprise to anyone who’s been reading this blog for any length of time or even looking at my drawing for the last couple years, the latest object of my unseemly delight for the genre being Caprica. While being the prequel to the truly spectacular remake of Battlestar Galactica, its narrative and style abandon BSG’s more recognizable breed of space-embattled Sturm und Drang in favour of a gorgeous 1950s aesthetic and self-conscious allusions to Dallas. Even beyond those strong 20th century references, this is sci-fi more in the Romantic order of Mary Shelley or E.T.A. Hoffmann, progenitors of the ego-driven scientist and his robot daughter.

I’ve taken to listening to Executive Producer David Eick’s episode commentary podcasts while working in the studio (yes, this will have something to do with art, trust me). Like Ronald D. Moore’s rather more entertaining podcasts for Battlestar Galactica, I find much of the creative problem solving discussed in these commentaries translates well across disciplines, and makes for encouraging listening when my own practice is suffering a creative lull, as it was last week.

Some 19 minutes into the commentary for Episode 102 (’Rebirth’), Eick and Co-Executive Director Jonas Pate reference their Lake Tahoe writer’s retreat in January 2009, where Caprica’s writing staff and producers talked story arcs during the day, played craps at night, and ultimately produced enough plot threads to carry the first nine episodes of the series rather than their goal of the first six. By listening to their profoundly informal discussion of this retreat, it became clear that this excess of creative production was a direct consequence of that setting:

Jonas Pate: “I think the writer’s room is the least effective way to do what it’s designed to do possible. You come into a white-walled, drop-ceiling room with a bunch of couches in the middle of some place that is essentially office park, and you’re expected to be creative. That’s not how to do it! Tahoe is the way to do it!”

Around this point in the podcast, I glanced around my white-walled studio space and wondered - despite the lovely view of suburban backyard and mud-splattered puppy - if this space was ever conducive to creative thinking. Lake Tahoe was starting to sound pretty damn good.

Scene from the pilot of Caprica: Daniel Greystone (Eric Stoltz) and Joseph Adama (Esai Morales) in a decidedly uninspiring virtual space.

And yet my studio space, like countless others I have been assigned as both student and artist-in-residence, is based in the white-walled aesthetic of contemporary art. While I have known artists who were happy to work in clean white rooms - video artists, mostly - I wonder whether the making of things and ideas requires a more liberal setting. A clean expansive space tends to indicate that thinking has occurred somewhere off-site while for others, this space becomes an outward expression of ideas in process in all their cluttered chaos. It ceases to be a white cube altogether.

Much like the writer’s intimidating blank page, the white-walled studio seems an ill-suited starting point for creativity. A creative space needs to be a space where conversation is generated, either between collaborators as in the Lake Tahoe retreat above (or any number of artists’ residencies) or between the individual artist and a space that carries its own conceptual weight. Both the site-specific maker and the nomadic artist seem to operate under those terms, but I’m increasingly convinced that this spatial conversation is crucial to any creative process. Ever since setting up my home studio two years ago, my most significant creative epiphany didn’t happen inside that white room but rather seemed to spring from wandering the rest of the house right down to the old apple tree in the backyard.

The notion of the studio as a refinery rather than a generator for ideas seems strangely self-evident after that meandering train of thought, though it contradicts the creation myths surrounding art-making that privilege the studio as a sort of womb for production. The prevailing wisdom still dictates that any time spent outside the studio is time not being spent in the making of art, but as one of my former classmates at Glasgow liked to reiterate, art does not happen in a vacuum. Art is given form in the studio, but it could - and perhaps, should - come in from somewhere else, like Lake Tahoe.

The point of this ramble being that maybe I shouldn’t have cleaned my studio after all. Or else I really need a vacation.

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