Artists at Work

The faces of artists at work are not mediated, not posed to express, for example, power, curiosity, joy or fear. The artists are inside of themselves, creating music, sculpting with their voices, studying the sound and meaning of two adjacent words, meditating on a gap dividing two painted rectangles. Often the artists’ faces are illuminated by stage lights for live crowds of thousands, or an audience a thousand times as large, glued to screens around the world. But the artists are inside of themselves, inventing, honing and modulating their creations to more powerfully express themselves. Shambroom searches for rare revealing moments, watching dozens of hours of pianists improvising, or painters thinking and talking about their work, to catch an instant when the artist’s face becomes a human microcosm, containing and revealing a world within a world.