Magic in Mess: The Dazzling Devotion of Student Artists

The mark of an artist is not always as clear as paint-splattered trousers or embarrassingly large hand-held portfolios. It can be subtle, secret-seeming, like a trace of ink on the wrist or a crimson callus on the ring finger. It can lie in the anatomy of an outfit, in the shimmer of an eyelid, in encircling bracelets and patterned nails. So much of an artist is hidden away, and yet minutely displayed. Each time I discover one of these marks, the ones that tell of stowed-away artworks and instruments waiting to be played, I feel like a wide-eyed kid. When the artist shows me their work, smiling a little in apologetic pride, I feel such a specific surge of wonder; to think I hadn’t known for sure, moments before, that they could render a human face with such tenderness, never ceases to confound and delight me. 

The wild and magical wielding of colour, in my eyes, should be admired in kind company and exhibited to all. At St Andrews, a university without a designated creative space, there is no concrete place to go. There is no place with communal paints, communal canvases, erasers and frazzled, colour-filled minds; and despite our heavenly landscape of rumbling sea and gently rolling slopes, there is no large-windowed studio. Art, however, thrives. 

St Salvator’s Hall is often full of music, the piano’s vibrato and the guitar’s mellow strum melting out of the common-room on orange-hued afternoons. Jin Liu, a first year student, often frequents the keys of Sallies’ grand piano. Liu notes that music offers her a “creative escapism,” a way to both get away from the world and immerse herself wholly in it. Liu’s dream is to play Tchaikovsky’s “Pas de Deux,” a song deeply intertwined with the composer’s loss of his sister. As a history scholar, Liu emphasizes that music is historical —  that one can feel, in the dance of the hands and lilting of notes, the emotions of a time or place or person. Anna Harcke, a first year student, also draws inspiration from history’s tapestry. Harcke’s current project is a translation of Renaissance artist Botticelli’s Birth of Venus onto a handmade gown. She is a member of the Art Society, which holds weekly life-drawing classes. Indeed, an ability to capture the contours and contrasts of human form is essential when replicating Renaissance style. Venus’s fiery hair spills across the dress, yet unfinished; one can only imagine the crescendo of colour when the gown, once donned, twirls round to reveal the sea-birth scene. 

Art is an entropic process, ever leaning towards disorder. Or, in Neve Baron-Russell’s words, it is the cause of a perpetually messy desk. Her workspace is strewn with beads of every colour, spools of thread, microscopic paintbrushes and muddled palettes. While working on her current embroidery project, Baron-Russell listens to Anna Karenina for English class or watches “Downton Abbey.” She shared that art has always been a familial activity; her parents taught her to stretch canvases and master colour, and she remarked fondly upon long evenings spent weaving textiles while watching Tangled. University has lessened the familial aspect of her art, but Baron-Russell persists in her passion. She too joined the Art Society, and practices with a variety of media on her own time. Dorm suitability, granted, is limited; “I don’t want to paint in the dorms, because obviously there’s a very high chance of that going wrong,” she noted. Indeed, oil-paint fumes and flammable turpentine are quite perilous, and would be particularly so to the archaic halls of this university. But some amount of mess, as Baron-Russell reminds us, is necessary.

Lean into entropy, and artwork will be borne by disorder. Spilt ink can be washed up later, charcoal can be swept to the side, the black residue blown off and drunk up by the wrinkles of a palm. The beautiful key-banging paintbrush-slashing mess of art imprints itself upon us, weaves itself into our essence. That mark, however minute, is loud. As Liu wisely observed, “Even if [art] is quiet, it’s not quiet, because it shapes a part of you. It shapes the part of you that you show to the world, who you are in the world.”

Artwork and photograph courtesy of Neve Baron-Russell