Creative community at its best is not comfort but stimulation — the presence of others whose seriousness about the work raises your own, whose different approaches make your assumptions visible, whose failures and successes offer evidence about what is possible. The artistic circle does not protect its members from difficulty but provides the context in which difficulty can be shared, named, and metabolized. Many of the works that have lasted were made inside communities of this kind, where the work was both individual and held.
Each step builds on the last.