Category: studio maintenance

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My first painting of January

My recent works have been in shades of white, and that’s sadly not about winter.
A problem hidden behind a wall can upset the most carefully-crafted schedule.

One of the problems with following other artists on social media is that you can really feel out of step. Earlier this week, many artists were posting their “last painting of the decade.” Immediately on the heels of that, many started the Strada January 31-day challenge.

Daily painting exercises are great, especially for plein air painters. When the world is a swirl of grey, it’s sometimes hard to remember why we paint. Here on the 44th parallel, we’re up to about eight hours of daylight right now. The temptation to wrap oneself up in front of the fire and read can be overwhelming.
My last work of 2019. I call this Fifty Shades of White, because it’s difficult to match whites. On the other hand, the new woodstove is a great improvement.
Think of daily painting exercises as playing scales. No matter how excellent your teachers are, you won’t get better if you don’t practice. You stop being anxious about the results and concentrate more on the process.
Routine is not our enemy; in fact, whatever makes you work regularly and most productively should be embraced. That’s the message of the book Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking, by David Bayles and Ted Orland.
As much as I admire the January Strada challenge, I never play. I invariably find myself mired in a big home-repair project at the New Year. I’m done with Christmas, and I’ve had a few weeks without students. I can tear things apart and make a colossal mess, something I can’t do in the summer when the push to produce and sell work is on.
My first painting of January started by pushing things around in my studio. I’m doing it in thirds, and it took all day for me to empty the first third.
In December, we had a new woodstove installed. As often happens, there was a problem hidden in the wall.  That meant plasterwork and an unscheduled repainting of the room.
I’d also planned to paint the floor of my studio. The prior owner and her grandkids had painted flowers on it years ago. It was sweet, but the radiant-heat floor had developed a crack. Its surface was battered with years of hard use—fine for a studio, but not for selling paintings.
Primed and painted and then I toddled off to bed. More of an oyster than a true white, I think.
Most fine-art painters I know are also good wall painters. We know how to use brushes, and are used to prepping substrates. It makes sense to DIY, and we’re lucky to have this useful skill set. But, like everyone else, we have other things we’d rather be doing. For me, that’s more painting, but with a smaller brush.
There’s no dawdling for me this weekend. I’m teaching in here on Tuesday morning. (If you’re interested in joining this local class, there’s information here.) There’s nothing like a deadline to speed things up!
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Everything I know about cleaning

Hercules rerouting the rivers Alpheus and Peneus to clean the Augean stables, Roman mosaic, 3rd century AD. The Fifth Labor of Hercules was intended to be humiliating and impossible, since the livestock were divine and produced enormous quantities of manure. No metaphor there.
I am trying to put my house and studio in order after months on the road.
There are those who might think this should be blank, because I don’t know anything about cleaning, but they would in fact be wrong. Most orderly people don’t need to think about how they keep things up; I have to think about it a great deal.
  1. Be driven by process, not results: King Augeas’ stables are very dirty and if you’re not Hercules, the only way to get them clean is to plug along despite how little progress it appears you are making. Yesterday I managed to get half a room finished; I was stalled by the piles of receipts and bills that needed attention on the dining room table. I can either be driven nuts by this, or I can just plug along until I finish.
  2. Actually put stuff away. That really slows you down—especially if you think the stuff has no place—but in the end it’s far more effective than moving piles of stuff from point to point.
  3. Or get rid of stuff. We 21st century Americans are drowning in material goods. To me there’s energy and potential in open space.
  4. Clean the perimeter first, starting at one point and working your way around the room. I read this in a book about professional cleaning, and it really works. I think it’s a continuation of point #1: if you’re looking at the walls, you can’t be driven nuts by your current lack of results.
  5. Don’t clean what isn’t dirty. Don’t straighten what isn’t messed up.
  6. Do all cleaning in a single pass. I am lucky enough to have modern windows, and I clean them whenever I clean my rooms. It’s dumb to pull the furniture out to vacuum and then not do the crown-molding, the windows, and the chair rails.
  7. Once you get one corner of your space clean, protect it; it’s a place to retreat when you lose your mind. Normally, this is the second floor of my house, which I generally keep pretty tidy. However, my peripatetic paintings from the RIT show seem to be wandering around up there looking for a home. So for now, I’m taking solace in the fact that my freezer—which was full of ice because someone had neglected to pull the door totally closed—is now immaculate. Even that small rectangle of order is enough to prevent me from losing my mind.

Hercules takes a break, Attic black figure skyphos, c. 500 B.C. The goddess Athena is pouring him a cup of wine. (Mount Holyoke College Art Museum)


Message me if you want information about next year’s classes and workshops.

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Mastering chaos

Francis Bacon is the icon of messy-studio advocates. He was renowned as much for the awful state of his studio as for his brilliant painting, but he did occasionally attempt to clear it. Electrician Mac Robertson was working at Bacon’s studio when he saw the artist disposing of ephemera. He asked to keep it, and thirty years later, sold it for more than a million dollars. There’s a lesson in that, but I hardly know what it is. 

For the first time since June I am home without another trip (planned or emergency) on my immediate horizon. It’s autumn and my favorite season to paint, and I will get outside to do that, but my primary goal has to be to pull my studio and home in order for fall.

There is a myth that creatives enjoy working in chaos, but that isn’t true. All people tend to create messes when in the throes of work, but most of them understand that when they are finished, they need to clean them up. Creating order doesn’t come easily to me, but as an adult I’ve learned it’s the only way I can be productive.
Contemporary Australian painter McLean Edwards continues the Bacon tradition in his Sydney studio. If I were his mother, I’d tell him to clean that mess up, and to stop drinking while painting.
I think this idea of the messy artist is a continuation of the myth of artists-as-geniuses, and it actually stops many people from being as productive as they might otherwise be. The vast majority of us do not thrive in chaotic working and living conditions. I’ve been in many of my peers’ studios, and most of them are sensible, organized workrooms. (In some cases, what an outsider perceives as clutter is actually just order in a very small space.)
I would normally “reset” my studio and workshop in the early fall anyway—go through my stock, winnow supplies, and reorganize shelves. For me, chaos effectively blanks out all thinking, and I like the idea of spring and fall cleaning.
To the contrary, note that Jackson Pollock’s chaos was pretty much confined to his canvases. 
This year, it’s worse, because my RIT show was pulled for being obscene, and the work ended up stacked in the middle of my studio floor. At a loss about how to put it away in a hurry, I moved it to my bedroom, where it’s still in the way. Until I get it properly stored, there’s no easy living in my house.
On top of that, there are three months of mail to go through, and three months of dirt to vacuum. (My family did a decent job of maintaining order, but the finer points of housekeeping are beyond them.)

Message me if you want information about next year’s classes and workshops.
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How not to clean your studio

Never let them stash stuff in your studio…. unless there’s no other place for it, of course. Sadly the cello and the hats are probably safest here right now.

Joe the Painter stopped by last week looking for work. I like Joe, and I have a very old house with plaster walls which occasionally need to be taped and touched up. “But Joe,” I cautioned him. “I am finishing up a painting and I really need to concentrate.” Of course he promised me that there would be a minimum of disruption and of course he was wrong. (And I knew this going in; I wasn’t born yesterday.)

There is no room to serve as a staging area when one is painting in every room on the first and second floors, reworking a hardwood floor and building two window frames. So even though I hated to do it, I stashed stuff in my studio. End of any painting by me.
The painting stash. Everything needs to be away from the walls to patch. Everything. Sigh.
This is fine, because staging a project like this always ends up being more than a full-time job. There is stuff needed from the lumber yard, and problems squaring things up. New problems that weren’t in the quote appear as if by magic; tools are suddenly needed that weren’t expected. Having a woodshop of my own, I’m useful in these circumstances.
My brother asked me why I hire out this rather pricey work when I know how to do it myself. But without more hands than mine it would never get done. A week of this disruption is more than sufficient.

There are still spots open in our mid-coast Maine plein air workshops! Check here for more information.