Going it Alone: Creativity Through Isolation

Contemporary art increasingly rewards collaboration – through funding structures, institutional partnerships, collective studios, and community engagement. There are artists choosing to present their work collectively, such as the architecture collective Assemble, won the Turner Prize. And yet the trope of solitary genius artist exists for a reason, too. Some of the most singular artistic practices have emerged through isolation.

For artists like Agnes Martin, Hilma af Klint, Bill Traylor, and Charles Burchfield, isolation was not just a working condition but a framework that shaped the work itself. Sometimes chosen, sometimes imposed, solitude became their way of filtering the world: reducing noise, creating control, or withdrawing from systems that felt incompatible with their practice.

Drivers and Benefits

Artistic communities and institutional networks were already firmly embedded within the art world by the late nineteenth century. Movements such as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Bauhaus positioned collaboration, shared philosophy, and collective identity at the centre of artistic production. But alongside these structures were artists who worked in relative isolation, either by choice or circumstance.

The drivers behind isolated practice vary widely. For some artists, solitude offers concentration and distance from the distractions of artistic communities. For others, isolation emerges through circumstance: illness, poverty, grief, social exclusion, or disillusionment with the institutions surrounding contemporary art. In many cases, withdrawal from public or collaborative environments has become a way of protecting a personal visual language from external pressures and expectations.

Despite the difficulties that often accompany isolation, it can create the conditions for sustained introspection. Distanced from the demands of artistic circles and public expectation, some artists developed highly personal visual languages shaped by repetition, memory, spirituality, or close observation of their surroundings. For artists such as Georgia O’Keeffe and Agnes Martin, solitude became less a retreat from creativity than a framework through which it could be sharpened.

The forms this isolation took differed dramatically from artist to artist, but in each case solitude shaped not only the conditions of production, but the character of the work itself.

Agnes Martin

Agnes Martin, the American-Canadian painter is known for her abstract expressionism and a distinctly minimalist style.

Originally growing up in rural Canada, Martin was no stranger to a level of isolation. After studying and some time spent teaching, she moved to New York and was, for a period, based in Coenties Slip, where she was part of a thriving artists community. However in 1967 following the loss of her friend Ad Reinhardt, the changing shape of the Coenties Slip, and her ongoing struggles with her own mental health, she moved out of New York.  She didn’t begin painting again until 1974, and while she was active in the art world, from this point on she worked in isolation in her adobe in Cuba, New Mexico.

The influence of these experiences is evident in her work. Martin’s restrained grids and muted compositions can be read as an attempt to impose stillness and order onto psychological and environmental turbulence. Rather than expressive excess, her paintings pursue reduction: quiet repetitions, softened edges, and carefully controlled space.

The landscape of New Mexico gradually softened the atmosphere of her paintings. While the grid structures remained, her later works introduced warmer tones and more diffuse colour, echoing the stillness and expansiveness of the desert environment in which she lived and worked.

Hilma Af Klint

While Martin’s isolation sought silence and control, Af Klint’s emerged through spiritual withdrawal and the belief that artistic meaning could exist outside public recognition. Hilma Af Klint was a Swedish abstract artist working in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

She has often been forgotten for her influence on the abstract movement, despite being one of the earliest abstract artists in the western world. Although she has enjoyed a resurgence in interest in the last decade, and has her first solo exhibition in France at the Grand Palais this year.

Her early works were traditionally naturalistic and the main source of her income. Her move toward abstraction emerged through spiritualism and an increasing involvement with theosophy and occult practices. Although the work circulated within spiritualist and theosophical circles, it remained largely absent from conventional exhibition spaces during her lifetime. This lack of exposure was partly driven by her own wishes, believing the world was not ready for her work; she requested it not be exhibited until 20 years after her death.

Spiritualism sat at the centre of her practice. Af Klint believed many of her compositions were directed through séances and communication with higher spiritual entities. Until 1908 she was part of a group called ‘The Five’ and while she had several close friendships with prominent figures in the anthroposophical circles, namely Rudolph Steiner and Annie Besant, she predominantly worked alone and in commune with her ‘mystic beings’. These beliefs shaped both the imagery and process of her work, with automatic drawing and writing often used as the starting point for larger compositions.

Bill Traylor

If Af Klint concealed her work intentionally, Bill Traylor’s isolation was imposed through social and economic exclusion. Bill Traylor has a much more unusual journey compared to most artists. For most of his early life, he was enslaved on a plantation in Alabama. Not much truly changed after emancipation, as he worked as a sharecropper on the same farm. It wasn’t until the 1930s when Traylor was in his 80s and living on the streets of Montgomery that he started producing work and it was noticed.

Traylor’s isolation was less a creative choice than a condition shaped by poverty, age, and exclusion. He was befriended by Charles Shannon who championed his work for years although was unable to get Traylor the recognition he deserved in his lifetime. It wasn’t until 1979 that Shannon secured Traylor’s first gallery show. For decades, his work was largely framed through the categories of “outsider” and “folk” art rather than being fully integrated into wider histories of modern American art.

In just ten years, he made over a thousand works. His work is representative of the history of his life, depicting a range of scenes from his enslavement, some simple farm animals, through to distinctive representations of the horrors faced by enslaved people. He also drew on the visuals from the advertising around him, depicting camels and lions. It’s unlikely he would have seen these animals in his life but with cigarette advertising prominent on high streets he would have been able to draw on these visuals. The visual language of the work reflects this isolation. Figures, animals, and symbols often appear suspended against empty space, stripped of conventional perspective or setting. Without formal training or sustained access to artistic institutions, Traylor developed an intensely personal visual system drawn directly from memory, observation, and survival.

Charles Burchfield

Charles Burchfield was an American watercolour painter and contemporary of Edward Hopper.

Burchfield began painting at school before going on to the Cleveland Institute of Art. It’s considered that he had three distinctive periods in his lifetime. His early work, made during his time in college through to 1917, during which he produced half his lifetime output; his middle period producing small town and industrial scenes which he sold to support his family while working alongside a wallpaper design job; and his later work produced after facing a psychological crisis at the age of 50.

Both his early and later works were rooted in close observation of the natural world, though filtered through an increasingly psychological and symbolic lens. Much of the large volumes produced at his time in Salam from 1915-17 was influenced by the surrounding landscapes. His work, at times described as a ‘spiritualized view of the world’, he himself described his work stating “An artist must paint not what he sees in nature, but what is there. To do so he must invent symbols, which, if properly used, make his work seem even more real than what is in front of him.”

His landscapes often feel psychologically charged, transforming weather, trees, insects, and buildings into animated emotional presences. While there has been speculation of the changes that drove the differing periods of his work, Burchfield himself has said “I don’t think an artist ever knows why he changes from one style to another. If he did, I don’t think it would be genuine.”

Unlike Martin or Af Klint, Burchfield’s relative isolation emerged less from deliberate withdrawal than from the practical demands of work, family life, and geography. After art school he was in the army for a short period and then went on to marry and have a large family that needed supporting. While he often socialised with other artists, the influences of his surroundings drove the subjects within his work and his uniquely fantastical view of the natural world shines through in the tonality, gradients and angularity in his expression.

Compulsion or Crisis

Exploring a range of artists that worked in isolation demonstrates the multitude of drivers. Ranging from an interest into the occult, dealing with mental health struggles through to difficult situations outside of our control, isolated working comes in many forms and can produce a range of creative outputs.

It may be a privilege for those that are able to choose their isolation because of the creative benefits. O’Keeffe who lived a similar life of solitude in the desert as Agnes Martin, stated that her isolation was ‘a kind of freedom’.

While many artists that later worked in isolation went through traditional art school routes, their choice to situate themselves on the periphery of the art world perhaps gave them a freedom of expression outside of those confines or expectations. Some produced work in parallel such as af Klint and Burchfield to support their more personal practices allowing us to understand this more distinctly.

But does the quality and the themes of the work differ due to the origin of their respective isolations or does each demonstrate a greater depth of understanding to their own sense of self through this? From Traylor through to Burchfield, their varying experiences each produced a fantastical abstract quality to their works, a simplicity that may be harder to produce when working more directly within a community.