hi from london! on navigating transitions
on using an artist's mindset to navigate a big transition.
This is my first London dispatch, and writing this newsletter, it’s hard to believe that I’m physically here! Thousands of miles from the US. I counted and I’m coming up on my fifteenth day. For some context, I moved here to do my Masters in Art History, though my term starts September 18th. In the meantime, I’ve been simply existing and trying to navigate the transition with patience and grace, which in all honesty has been harder than I’ve expected.
The biggest challenge has been navigating an unfamiliar environment without a network of familiar faces, places, and support. Even though the language is the same, I’ve been thrown off by the things I take for granted: when I’m crossing the street not knowing where to look (I’ve only gotten more confused), time zones, turns of phrase in conversation (cheeky is a new favorite), unrefrigerated eggs, and the metric system!
I know that things will get easier once my term starts, but with all my free time (now that I’ve settled in) my sense of aloneness feels magnified, though I know, intellectually, I’m not. I miss little things: being able to get larger portions of vegetables that aren’t prepackaged in plastic (usually), familiar acquaintances, texting (not sending a WhatsApp) to family and friends, biking at the lake, and knowing where to go to study.
They’re also many things I appreciate about London. You can always find a quick and delicious bite to eat at an outdoor market. The arts are better funded—there’s a panoply of free (!!) museums and arts events. It isn’t as loud as New York, and it feels like there are a million livable areas to discover all connected by a speedy Tube. Scones with jam and cream! The store-bought Brazil nuts perplexingly taste better.
Most of all though, I want to build a life here. And truly live here for the year. Not just feel like I’m a visitor passing through.
So, how have I been navigating the transition?
Two ideas from art history and artistic practice that have been leading my way. When I first came here (and I’m still feeling this impulse), I was trying to make my life in London mirror my life back home. And following that, holding this idea of being the same person that I was then, or am now generally speaking. But that’s not really what a transition is, can be, or should be in its fullest.
A transition is a liminal place. It’s the uncomfortable period of in-between. Of moving from one place to a new place, but changing, adapting, and transforming in perpetual flux to something other in the process. It’s a discrete and separate time of being that has a little bit of the old, but also maybe, anticipates what’s to come.
The first idea I keep returning to is how to get unstuck as an artist, a maker. When you’re trying to unknot a painting that isn't quite working, you don’t throw the painting away and start over. Instead, you make a move. You open up a new possibility. Maybe that means closing your eyes, picking up the ultramarine you’ve neglected and making a zigzag across the canvas. Seeing how you can work with that. Turning the canvas upside down and painting from there. This is the best lesson that making has gifted me.
In terms of life, this means throwing something different in the mix, and seeing how I respond to it. Downloading Bumble BFF and meeting a girl from New Zealand for a coffee? Why not! Trying to find an odd job. What would happen if I lingered and tried to talk to someone at the opening that I’d normally zoom out of? And so forth.
The second idea is throwing it back to some classic art history-core. But I’ve been luxuriating in the concept of being a flâneur. Someone who is immersed in the city’s thrum, but is also separate from it. An observer. Charles Baudelaire describes the flâneur:
“The crowd is his domain, just as the air is the bird’s, and water that of the fish. His passion and his profession is to merge with the crowd. For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very centre of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions. The observer is a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes” — Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863).
The gendered connotations can’t be missed here, and it’s important to underscore that not all bodies can (or did) experience the access to “public” space that Baudelaire discusses. But, the spirit of a little flâneurisie (as a treat) has been keeping me going. I’m time-rich right now, and luxuriating in spotting a joyful reunion between friends, the corporate buzz, people on the Tube with their own lives and cares and worries has been animating London (ah, London!) for me.
I hope you’ll be gentle and courageous with yourself, and I’ll see you next week!
I love getting thoughts and comments! You can say hi on TikTok. Any London recs? Must sees? Must avoids? If you enjoyed this post, feel free to send it to a friend.