ARTIST STUDIO: TONY CRAGG
Tony Cragg is so prolific and his sculpture uses such a variety of materials that it’s easy to imagine him covered in crap hammering away in a gritty workshop. But this picture shows him clean and well dressed in an organised space of almost religious purity; a space in Wuppertal, Germany that has twenty full...
ARTIST STUDIO: WILLEM DE KOONING
About half a year ago I wrote about the way my perception of reality had been modified by experiencing a Dan Flavin sculpture in Italy, and about the power that art alone has for improving our lives in this manner. My perception of the art of painting was modified in a similar way...
ARTIST STUDIO: FRANK AUERBACH
When I first came across this picture of Frank Auerbach in his studio it amused me; such a good illustration of the mental state that working as an artist can lead you to when things aren’t going right. Then it made me think about Auerbach, who I used to follow and admire very...
ARTIST STUDIO: OLAFUR ELIASSON
Eliasson’s ‘modus operandi’ is probably more similar to that of an architect or even an engineer than to other visual artists, so I guess his studio was bound to look like it does in these pictures: A kind of mix between a scale model workshop and the study of a mad scientist. _ El...
ARTIST STUDIO: DAVID HOCKNEY (AGAIN)
I love this image from the 1970′s of Hockney in his Paris studio with his painting My Parents and Myself half finished. Hockney did two similar double portrait paintings of his parents around the time he came into crisis with the almost photographic realism that had made him a world famous artist. ...
ARTIST STUDIO: PICASSO
If I could choose the studio of any artist to use myself, without a doubt it would be Picasso’s one at ‘La Californie’ in Cannes; an amazing building imbued by all the drawings, prints and paintings that Picasso created there that reflect its character and the – obviously exaggerated – Mediterranean good life...
ARTIST STUDIO: CHUCK CLOSE
This isn’t any old picture of Chuck Close working in his studio, the painting he is working on is Fanny/Fingerpainting (1985), a portrait of his wife’s grandmother resolved completely by applying his fingerprints to the canvas and masterfully varying the pressure to create the varying shades needed for such a photographic result. _ Esta no...
ARTIST STUDIO: PIET MONDRIAN
This shot of Mondrian’s studio comes to prove that every artist is an ‘installation artist’ since long before the term ‘installation art’ was created to define a specific art form. Mondrian´s use of studio space is simply the composition of his paintings applied to the real world. What else can artist do? _...
ARTIST STUDIO: ROY LICHTENSTEIN
The bright colours, the clean floor, the slick aluminium ladder and the house plant just making it into the picture on the bottom right; the photograph is almost like a Lichtenstein painting in itself. Also interesting to see some aspects of that painting process of his that produces such clean machinelike results. _ Los...
ARTIST STUDIO: APELLES
I love to see how a great artist – Giambattista Tiepolo – imagined and painted the studio of another great artist – Apelles – who lived twenty centuries before him. But for me what really makes this painting is the way it illustrates the fact that a good painter will go to any...
ARTIST STUDIO: BALTHUS
This picture of Balthus and his wife Setsuko in the studio magically captures the aura of mystery and sophistication that marked the painter’s later years, when his life elapsed in a Swiss chalet with his kimono clad wife and daughter. The posture of the old painter in the armchair seems to mirror that of the...
ARTIST STUDIO: PHIDIAS
Phidias’ workshop in Olympia. Image: www.panoramio.com It’s very humbling to look back through 2.500 years to the workshop of the greatest of all classical sculptors and read the inscription on his cup that says ‘I belong to Pheidias’. His workshop had been represented, purely through imagination, by artists like Lawrence Alma...
All schools should be art schools.
