"Being an individual artist is a lonely profession," says Kloe Kang of Seven, the fledgling group of Honolulu artists whose third — but first major — exhibition, "Seven: Up," opens this week at the Academy Art Center.

She's right, although the image of the artist toiling alone, far from the madding crowd, often is romanticized.

Take, for example, signage from the Honolulu Academy of Arts' 2005 exhibition by current art-world darling, Neo Rauch, which pointedly described the artist's self-imposed exile from German city life to his humble garret studio in the country. It was perfect mythologizing-in-the-making.

Or take The Contemporary Museum's 2005 "Shaka Nara" collaboration between Japanese cult-hero artist Yoshitomo Nara and several local artists. Their installation — a rough country "studio" replete with cliched tin roof, cassette tapes and action figures — was intended, wall text proclaimed, to represent the artist's universal isolation.

Yet the shack was not so much a generally representative, metaphorical studio as it was an idealized space that represented the particular pop-culture obsessions of one group of artists. It recalled most how hip isolation serves the whole mystique of the artist: It's the gold standard of cool. Or at least it has been, until recently.

For while artists thrive in that meditative state that frees the mind of distractions, most don't have a quaint country shack in which to work. Katherine Love of Seven, for one, paints in the corner of a narrow, semi-protected condominium lana'i.

Then there are those post-art-school blues. After luxuriating in a structured, stimulating environment, many graduate to dual careers: one that pays bills, such as Seven member Karen Lee's healthcare job, and another as an artist. Art can become a casualty in an artist's day-to-day existence.

As Nadine Ferraro remarks, "Once you're out of school, it's a whole different picture."

Enter Seven. Seven female painters, many graduates of the University of Hawai'i's MFA program in visual art, comprise the group: Ferraro, Kang, Lee, Birgitta Leitner, Love, Mary Mitsuda and Yida Wang. All are early- to mid-career artists established in Honolulu and elsewhere.

What unites them, says Wang, is their gusto for painting and drawing.

Like Wang, who teaches at UH, many group members have a hand in education; their show will include explanations of finished works using preliminary drawings or studies, journal notes, photographs and references.

Exposing art as a fluid, impressionable process chips away at the modernist fetish for genius and sole authorship, ideas critical to the cult and marginalization of the artist. No one work — or artist — springs from the forehead of Zeus.

Such thinking may help explain an unprecedented rise in art collectives, artists working together to produce often conceptual, radical projects: the new gold standard of art-world cool. The buzz at this year's pulse-taking Whitney Biennial in New York City is that the autonomous artist increasingly is passe.

But are collectives really rejecting autonomy for democracy — or just following social cues? The radical upheavals of our era may have less to do with 1960s ideals of debunking the status quo than with how we think about ownership and dispersal of information in the age of electronic communication.

At Andy Warhol's 1960s "Factory" or Judy Chicago's 1970s collective, many artists' work became known by the lead artist's name. Current collectives approach identity and ownership differently. Some suggest that collaborators are a single, real person. Or a single artist acquires multiple, fictional identities — compound selves that coalesce into a "group" identity.

Collectives are also "showing" in unusual spaces. One, notoriously, opened a subversive gallery front — Reena Spaulings — that has become a viable gallery. Many exhibit in cyberspace.

According to art critic Holland Cotter, it's all good. Collectives disrupt ideas of who makes art, how it's seen and whether art must be a specific object versus, say, a cyberspace assault or marketing campaign.

Honolulu's Seven, unlike a bona-fide collective, doesn't collaborate on pieces, leaving the cult of the individual artist intact. They produce traditional, two-dimensional works that don't forward a radical polemic.

Yet the group, in the broader sense of "collective," collaborates on artistic life, together navigating a lonely and logistical business. They may not be rocking the art world; but they are tweaking its mystique of hip isolation.

Chatting with Seven one Sunday as they address invitations, it's clear that their personal bonds are as crucial as their professional ties — and that they, like collectives, understand consensus.

Birgitta Leitner, who painted uncharacteristically large works for the show (the group agreed on size requirements to suit the space), finds Seven's easy intimacy serendipitous: "It's one of the nicest surprises ... we can be honest with each other."

The group's initial goal of a large-scale exhibition has arrived. What's next? Someone floats the idea that the group's ad-hoc critiques could morph into regular studio visits. Another suggests group collaboration, a concept that smells ... well, like a collective.

Let's hope that Seven continues to think big: They have talent and revolutionary potential. After all, it was an unassuming ladies' tea circle in a rough-and-tumble Old West mining town that put the word "suffragette" on the map.

Freelance writer Marie Carvalho covers art and literature.