Upgrading the Studio, Part 2

Is a Blank Studio like a Blank Canvas?

Here are a few photographs of the nearly empty studio. Yes, the empty studio, just like the blank canvas, is both a little scary and very exciting.

Feels hard to have the empty studio and to know it will never be the space it was. This studio was a wonderful collaborator for many years. I am sure that I need to make some changes, but I have come to love that dark place where it is often hard to see and there isn't proper storage. Letting go of that warm dark wood and the Bohemian disorder isn't easy. But I am, and now it is eagerness to start anew, make a new space, and see what paintings emerge there.

Lots has been written about the mystique of the artist's studio. Lovers of art make pilgrimage to sites like Cezanne's studio in Aix en Provence. They feel they will see and understand more of an artist's work if they stand where he or she did. Artists write about their studios as places they create to provide a home for their work. Their studios become self-portraits.

Here are just a few artists' quotations on their connections with their studios:

Bruce Nauman: "I was an artist and I was in the studio, so whatever I was doing in the studio must be art."

And the more romantic, Delacroix: "...the crucible where human genius at the apogee of its development brings back to question not only that which is, but creates anew a fantastic and conventional nature which our weak minds, impotent to harmonize it with existing things, adopt by preference, because the miserable work is our own."

And the more direct and slightly less intimidating words about his studio from a very old abstract expressionist painter: "Don't go in there. I have been making wild passionate love in there for fifty years. It is not pretty."