A poet's thoughts jotted down on paper. The quiet whispers of brushstrokes on canvas.
A soul at peace yet filled with dazzling brilliance just waiting to come out.
A painting in a gallery or a heart-wrenching novel is easy to appreciate. What's not so easy to understand is what the artists go through to create that painting or write that book.
For that, there is the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
Tucked away in a renovated farmhouse and barn in Amherst County, the center is the nation's largest artist residency program. It's also one of a few residency programs with locations on two continents. In addition to Virginia, the VCCA has a location in France.
VCCA is celebrating its 40th anniversary, and the yearlong festivities kick off Saturday with a sold-out event at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
Executive Director Suny Monk said the center's purpose is simple — provide a quiet, peaceful environment where artists can get lost in their work or collaborate with other like-minded people.
In other words, "remove the finest talents from the distractions of everyday so that those noisy lives can be quieted," she said, "and the work can come out at a much greater volume."
More than 350 artists from around the world come to VCCA each year, Monk said, with about 25 residents there at a time. They spend anywhere from two weeks to two months at the center, where they have their own bedroom and a studio specifically outfitted for their needs. They're given three meals a day, and while there are scheduled activities for interaction among the residents, there's no obligation to attend.
If artists want to be sequestered for a month in their studio to work, that's what they do.
"People go in and build their own worlds in there," Monk said.
Sometimes, though, the collaboration with other artists over a meal or during a poetry reading or a music recital can be the inspiration needed to get the creative juices flowing.
Monk said former VCCA Fellows have gone on to earn nearly every artistic award possible, including nearly 100 people since 2005. They are people like National Book Award winner Alice McDermott; Country Music Award and Grammy Award winner Kathy Mattea, Pulitzer Prize winners Claudia Emerson and David Del Tredici, Guggenheim Fellowship Award winners Richard McCann and Kim Addonizio, and National Endowment for the Arts winners Shannon Cain and Donald Platt.
Tanja Softic, professor of art and chairwoman of the Art and Art History Department at the University of Richmond, has been to VCCA four times since 1997. Among her most recent work is a series of prints called "Migrant Universe," which explores the theme of cultural identity. It was inspired by the civil war in her hometown of Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in the early 1990s. At the time, she was working toward her master's degree at Old Dominion University.
"Artists need time and space and little else," Softic said. "It's amazing how much time we have when we're not dealing with" phone calls or grocery shopping or the demands of everyday life.
What she loves about VCCA is the variety of people who are there at any given time.
"You will find people there who are Pulitzer Prize winners and poets right out of graduate school," she said. But "there's no hierarchy. We're all doing the same thing."
Monk likened the center to a medical research laboratory, "where a germ of an idea is given an opportunity to be investigated and supported."
While the VCCA is a retreat, a vacation it's not.
"It's serious stuff," Monk said. "These people have often given up a lot of material goods to be the navigator and speakers and observers for the rest of us."
She added, "They're a fascinating group of people and in a lot of ways are the core of humanity."
hprestidge@timesdispatch.com
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