“You’ve got the light all wrong,” he said, as he grabbed the paint brush from my hand, picking up a chunk of white paint from the palette, and planting it on the canvas in one smooth swoop before I could even blink.

“You’re too close. You can’t even see!” He took a step back, grimaced at my canvas, and then shuffled away, not even taking a second look at my wide eyes and shocked face.

The painting I had spent hours on, lugged to and from my apartment to the windowless studio on Parsons’ 5th floor. In one quick glance, Mark knew it was wrong and that I would not get it right unless he broke it enough for me to take a step back and fix.

I stood there agast while my classmates hid their own paintbrushes as he made his way around the room.

“You are all too close!” he yelled in his whisper of a voice.

“You need to take a step back and consider your work from the other side of the room!”

Only a few people looked up.

Some had grown more than weary of his approach to teaching our Painting Studio class. Others were completely uninterested in what our older professor had to say.

I kept my eyes on him as he huffed a sigh and started dragging tables and easels around the room.

People tried to ignore him, but he just grabbed their canvases and moved their easels away, saying, “The corner!”

It wasn’t until all the desks were shoved into half of the room with a single easel in the corner and all of us students in the other did he begin to explain.

“In my master’s, my mentor, Philip Guston, would make us stand in the opposite corner of the room before we could declare a piece complete, or rather incomplete.”

We all looked at each other. Yes – THE Philip Guston. But the name drop wasn’t the point.

He went on, “If you stand too close, what isn’t working may not appear to you. You may ruin what is by trying to solve a problem you cannot place.

Or, worse.

You may miss what isn’t working altogether because you are just too close. You must take a step back. Let your work greet you from the other side of the room.”

And so we did.

Now I have no idea what that moment meant to my classmates, but for me, it felt like the framework of my creative practice shifted in a moment.

Not for that self-portrait though…I’m pretty sure I threw that away on my way home.

Every problem that has presented itself to me, since that moment, I now ask myself, Am I standing too close?

Can I trust the vantage points from which I am considering this problem?

Where can I gain more perspective?

Am I lost in the weeds?

Don’t get me wrong, sometimes it takes me a hot second to realize I’m hunched over, butt-numb, waaay too close to my computer monitor to realize I need to take a step back (and put on my blue-light glasses).

But every time I find myself faced with a new problem – or creative rut I can’t solve – this is the question I ask myself.

The point is not to have a solution to the problem at hand. But, to answer a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

By removing the pressure to find an immediate solution and instead seeking out another vantage point to consider the situation, I find the solution.

Some days this looks like: returning to the research, taking a walk, consulting a colleague, stepping into the mind of the target audience, or taking a pilates class.

(Pilates??? – yes, one to many creative ideas have occurred to me on the bed of the reformer, BUT I digress.)

This one lesson single-handedly shifted my approach to painting, but most importantly, how I approach points of friction as they appear in my creative practice AND how I solve these problems for clients.

Okay, sure, maybe you are rolling your eyes and thinking – really, Mckenna? That moment?

Yes.

After that semester, I would chase Mark down the halls and ask (beg) him to hire me as an assistant. To my surprise, it didn’t take too much convincing before I found myself buzzing into his Chelsea apartment/studio/gallery that was filled to the brim with canvases, pigments, and very little natural light, but that of the life of the artist.

I could tell you more stories – like the time he served me a microwaved cup of coffee and as we neared the end of the coffee break, how he told me he once discovered a cockroach at the bottom of a pot. Or, the time that Jean-Michel Basquiat was a student in his class. But that’s not the point of the blog post today.

Today, we are here to ask ourselves if we are standing too damn close.

Too close to see the solution to the problem (be it design, or marketing, or life) is right in front of us.

And after paying for my Showit Blog subscription for nearly 1 year without ever posting a blog post – I can say with absolute certainty that, yes. I needed to take a step back and take a moment to write.

Title Image: A self-portrait of Mark Saltz Himself

Footer Image: One of Mark’s many shelves of canvases and precious items.