Adam Grossi on Yoga and Art
Pine. acrylic and collage on wood panel. 48 x 48
Adam Grossi, {featured in the newest issue of Composite, No. 6 Process} is a Chicago based painter that has been a friend of the Composite team for several years now. However, beyond painting, Adam has also recently begun a new journey in the practice and instructing of Yoga. Intrigued by how this has all come together, we wanted to ask him some questions about the intersections of Yoga and art, and he kindly took the time to answer them.
Composite: Along with recently contributing to Composite no 6, Process, you also became certified to teach yoga. Growing up in suburban Virginia, I doubt it has always been a part of our daily life. When did you first become attracted to yoga, and what made you decide to pursue higher training in it?
Adam Grossi: I’ve had some kind of intuitive attraction to meditation since I was quite young, but I never had a practice until I was 19 or 20, when yoga first entered my radar. At the time I was an inspired but unstable art school student in Pittsburgh. I was so thoroughly obsessed with art that I wasn’t carving out space in my life to take care of myself, and the physical and psychological intensity was beginning to wear on me. There were a few really influential artists in the grad program and at least two of them were regular yoga practitioners, so perhaps that was what first tipped me off to the idea of attending a class. I don’t really remember how I got there, but I do vividly remember being in my first yoga class. In the middle of the sequence of physical postures I was in a standing forward fold and I just couldn’t believe how relaxed and relieved I felt. I was at a really tense place in my life, and I remember trying all sorts of things to calm down — mostly doofy college things — and none of them working. That was probably the first moment in days that I felt my brow un-furrow.
Despite the revelatory nature of that experience, it took me a few years to start practicing regularly. I was still too ignorant when I first found yoga to realize how much I needed it. It would take the complete unraveling of my psychological health, and the real possibility of losing the ability to maintain a lucid creative practice, to ignite the motivation within me to really commit to yoga. Looking back, these struggles and traumas were like an initiation into another way of life.
I started practicing yoga daily in 2007 and I haven’t stopped. Much like art, it just gets more interesting the more you spend time with it. After yoga served a functionally therapeutic role in grounding me mentally and keeping me healthy, I started to become aware of its larger philosophical implications, and the incredible variety of methods and intentions that all compete for space under the umbrella term of “yoga.” I became aware, much like I did as a painter, that the more I learned and practiced, the less my assumptions made sense and the more I needed to learn. That is why I decided to enter a teacher training program; it is the same motivation I had for attending grad school. I simply wanted to immerse myself in a focused environment that would help me better understand what I was doing.
CO: How does your yoga practice impact your work? There doesn’t appear to be much cross over topically, do they exist at all in the same place for you or do they tend to just be two aspects of your life that tend to stay within their compartments?
AG: On a superficial level, they stay in their compartments. I don’t make art about practicing yoga and I don’t consider my yoga practice to be part of my “artwork.” But at the same time, I’m very interested in synthesizing their underpinnings. Most contemporary art could be said to be a form of yoga practice, even the most seemingly vicious or dark work, if one were so inclined to view it through this lens. I’m moving toward a more cohesive personal metaphysics where yoga practices and the production of art both extend outward from the same place. I didn’t set out to make sure that this would happen, but it seems to be happening naturally as I understand more about both worlds. Yoga is largely about harnessing all of one’s ability and effort to the task of liberating consciousness from the delusions and trappings of the conditioned mind. In this light, it’s very easy to see my image-making practice as a more specific extension of this general goal.
On a more pragmatic level, the yoga practices I’m cultivating are incredibly grounding and work with the body in powerfully therapeutic ways. This allows the art-making to be destabilizing and otherwise difficult when it needs to be. As I learn more about yoga the back-and-forth is becoming richer: I’ll focus on using specific practices to target an area of the body that has become exhausted by my working process, for example, or I’ll emphasize a breathing technique that induces mental spaciousness when I’m frying my brain on some analytical problem in the art.
I remember a long time ago being at an artist residency program and having a studio visit with a well-known abstract painter. She saw an instructional yoga book in my studio and we talked about it a bit. “I love yoga,” I remember her saying, “but I never do it because it makes me not want to do anything else.” I will always remember that. It resonated with me later as I worried that going deeper into yoga was going to make me lose the motivation to make art. But over time I realized that what is lost through yoga is much of the daily anxiety and neurotic energy that so many of us rely on to basically get anything done. We make things, do things, and say things largely because we’re scared of not doing them, we’re worried about achieving certain things which seem important, or we’re measuring ourselves against people we feel we should be in step with. Consistent yoga practice does dramatically reduce that whole way of thinking, and this is initially rather unnerving… but at the end of the day, it’s helpful to pursuing art because it allows the motivation to work to come from other, deeper places.
CO: What suggestions do you have for anyone looking to incorporate yoga into their life?
AG: Find a good teacher that makes yoga comprehensible, accessible, and effective for you. Since there is such an immense variety of approaches, this can take some trial and error. Don’t set unrealistic expectations for the amount of time you’re going to devote to yoga; not every day needs to involve a 90-minute class. If you have a friend that has a committed yoga practice, I think that’s the best place to start: ask them if they’ll show you a few things. And if I had to recommend one book to get you started, it would be The Heart of Yoga: Developing a Personal Practice by T.K.V. Desikachar.
CO: With your inclusion in Pilsen’s Antena Project Space’s Tropical Aesthletics (best show title ever by the way), can we expect a continued trajectory of art and physical fitness to be a defining factor of your career?
AG: Haha! I sincerely hope not. But I do hope that bizarre contexts and strange titles continue to pepper my curriculum vitae.
CO: What do you have in the plans moving forward into spring and summer 2012?
AG: I will continue attempting to pay my bills as I devote almost all of my time to things I really care about. I will be making a lot of new paintings and works on paper, as well as trying to wrangle one of my many fragments of writing projects into a finished publication. In the studio these days the plan is to make work more effortlessly, and to concentrate the ruminating and deliberating into their own little pools of intensity between sessions of making. I’d like to build momentum over at Re:Markmaking (http://remarkmaking.com/), a collaborative blog for people who think through materials. In the realm of yoga studies, this summer I’m going to spend a month at a teacher’s intensive with Richard Freeman out in Boulder, Colorado, and I’m incredibly excited about the opportunity to learn from him. He just couldn’t be more interesting and expansive in his approach and perspective, and I anticipate that the experience will be tremendously generative for me on many levels. It will be painful to be away from my painting studio for a month, but I’m planning to have some kind of creative project to work on in the midst of all that stretching, sweating, and breathing in the mountains.
Learn more about Adam at www.adamgrossi.com.
