I enjoy looking through artist studios so much that I decided to make it a semi-regular thing. So if you have a few photos of your art studio or workspace and would like to share them, please send them to me.

Make sure the images are under 1mb in size as they don’t have to be MASSIVE and my inbox clogs up. Include a short paragraph about your space if you wish and your website address if you have one. Artist studios from all creative people are welcome and it doesn’t have to be a beautiful working space.. it just has to work for you.

Here’s the studios so far (listed alphabetically so that my studio is conveniently placed at the top..lol)

Dion Archibald’s Painting Studio – Working space of an Australian artist.
Jessica Burko’s Artist Studio – Mixed media artist based in Boston, MA, USA.
Gail Sauter’s Painting Studio – American painter working in Maine, USA.

I’ll add to the list as artists send them in (I have three other studios to add at the moment)

A photographer recently asked an interesting question on an old post called Painting from Photographs.

He asks..

What should a photographer do after receiving a request from a painter who wants to paint loads of his images?

I consider my photography as art on its own and somebody would like to do his/her art with my art.
Any suggestions?
I have no problem with 1-3 images painted and a credit line but more than 20???

My earliest recollections are of an elaborate grate that covered an air shaft in the house where I was raised in Brooklyn. The pattern of swirls-the positive and negative space-the completeness of the Victorian design captivated me. The vent went out into a back yard and because the brass plate so fascinated me, I created elaborate visual images in my mind that incorporated the polished plate, shadowy shaft and the leafy garden beyond. I sketched the grate and used black Crayola crayons to block out the negative space. One day, I discovered a way of looking at the plate and my sketches through the viewfinder of my Dad’s Kodak Brownie. It was magic! So began my passion for architectural elements that define and augment visual space and my desire to create own art from these masterworks of stone, metal, glass and wood.

As an adolescent, I began to discover and appreciate architectural details that adorn buildings in New York City. The early photographs that I took were purely to capture the visual. Each time I saw a flower carved in stone, an interlocking and intricate geometric design created by ironwork, an enchanting or fierce marble face over a doorway, I had to capture it on film. I would wait anxiously for the photographs to come back (this before my education of the darkroom and the infinite possibilities that chamber held) from the camera store. Opening those envelopes was an experience filled with all the wonder of childhood: the images of art poured forth. I cropped the artful architectural details to create my own art and frequently drew or painted elaborate illustrations from those photographs. Some of the drawings and paintings were taken from one architectural image; others combined several ornaments into one composition. While my contemporaries in art classes were studiously copying the works of the masters, I was replicating and interpreting in my own way the often unsung artists who had sculpted masterpieces that ornamented buildings right in my own neighborhood. I did not need to look in art books to find statues and paintings that were housed in European museums to find my inspiration: all I had to do was look around my Brooklyn street or take a subway to my personal Oz: Manhattan. The artworks were all around me on the buildings I passed every day.

As a photographer of details of architecture, I am still enthralled by the magnificent art and meticulous craft that went in to the creation of ornamentation of architecture in the past. When I plan a day of photographing architecture, likely as not, I will be amazed by the details that I discover-even now. Throughout my travels, I have photographed vine covered lampposts, grim faced gargoyles, beatific angels, elaborate serpentine designs and elegant art deco relief I first photograph some of the area in which the detail exists. For example, on a recent shoot, I found inspirational subjects in Grand Central Station. Before taking photographs of the details to which I was drawn, I took pictures of the entire building from numerous angles. I then isolated the details of architecture that I wished to photograph. I always work with natural light to emphasize the characteristics of the detail of architecture and the way in which it was initially created. After I am satisfied that I had enough photographs of the architectural detail, I shoot the surfaces of the detail and the surrounding area up close so that I can understand the original medium: sandstone, marble, brass, oak, et al. Later, I look at the images for hours before selecting the very best way in which I can preserve and enhance the art of the architectural detail. The images of Grand Central Station’s magnificent architectural details gave me weeks of creative energy and a passion to return there often to seek out new details and further refine the previous photographs I took there.

My quest in seeking out architectural details from which to create my own art has given me a profound appreciation of the beauty and history of New York. The art of creating art from art can be a humbling, yet empowering experience. I have, on the one hand, the great artists who created these marvels of ornamentation to live up to as I incorporate their art into my own. On the other hand, I am mentored by some of the best possible teachers. It was and continues to be a wonderful way to express myself through art.

Created by Ellen Fisch On 03/31/09 At 09:05 AM

I knew there was something strange about these portraits when I first looked at them but I just couldn’t figure out what it was. I thought the eyes had a realness about them that is hard to create, which turned out to be partly correct.

The artist Heide Hatry created these weird little creations with animal skin and body parts. So the eyes are real, but they’re real pigs eyes. The lips are raw flesh and the skin is from a pig.

In her statement from here website here, Heide Hatry says.. “My intention with the work was to make it as life-like as possible, vivid and sometimes disposed in positions suggesting movement. I used untreated pigskin to cover a sculpture I had made out of clay, with raw meat for the lips and fresh pig eyes in order that the resulting portrait would appear as if it were looking at the viewer with a vital expression which the photographer had just captured at that moment. In fact, a photographer taking a picture of a model does more or less what I’ve done with my sculptures: the model will be made up, its hair will be done, appropriate lighting and pose will be chosen, etc. Or, if you prefer, what I am doing is reminiscent of what a mortician does in preparing a corpse for viewing: creating the illusion of life where there is none.”

She is currently showing at the Pierre Menard Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Heads and Tales” finishes on the 17th of March. View more of the portraits at the artist’s website here or see a slideshow of images on the Phoenix newspaper.

Vincent Testard, a 24 year-old visual artist, lives and works in Bordeaux. His research is centred on the different representations of the individual and their link to society. His work uses drawings, paintings, installations and video.
This interview is an opportunity to get some information on his exhibition planned at the Galerie Tinbox in Bordeaux, in June 2009.

Hi Vincent. Thanks for the interview. Can you introduce yourself a little bit?
Vincent Testard, visual and plastic artist, Bordeaux. I’m 24 years old, born in 1984. I spent two years at the Fine Arts School in Lyon before moving to Bordeaux five years ago.

Tell me a little bit about your next exhibition…
It’s an exhibition at the Galerie Tinbox in Bordeaux, in June. It’s in two stages, first of all Vital Architecture and secondly Proxemic System. They are two conceptually close ideas, but they will be presented differently.
The base of this work is the sociological notion called Proxemics, defined in 1969 by the American sociologist Edward Hall. Proxemics is the study of distances that people put between themselves in a given space, and in a given culture. For example, in a North-American culture, a European culture or an Asian culture, the distances that come between people are not the same. Edward Hall worked on this theory, putting it into diagrams and schematics.
Based on this theory, I am working on the notion of the first sphere of intimacy, the one that protects the individual. This is the sphere that we often sense in a crowded subway, when we feel uncomfortable. These invisible spheres bang into one another and create a loss of intimacy.

Explain Vital Architecture to me…
Vital Architecture is the translation of these spheres in an architectural manner. All the geometrical spaces that you can see on the canvas are individuals. I recreate fictional architecture through these images.
I always work on sequences of 24 photographic exposures that enable me to show the movement of individuals linked to a space and to other people. There is a triangular effect between architecture, the individual (Me) and the Others (the world). But I am also part of the Others, so these three ideas are to be understood together.
As a plastic artist, I adapt this concept to different mediums.

How is it going to be presented at the Galerie Tinbox?
For Vital Architecture, there is going to be a series of 24 drawings, that will each measure 24 x 36 cms, that is the homothety (the exact ratio) of the photographic negative, then treated with a video base. There will also be a big canvas and a video. The video will be in the Tinbox, as the concept of the Tinbox is an exhibition space and a closed and reduced box-space. There will also be a wall painting that will show 8 proxemic spheres.
The first exhibition, Vital Architecture, will last two and a half weeks (from the 28th of May to the 13th of June 2009). The second exhibition, Proxemic System, will be shown for three weeks (from the 18th of June to the 4th of July 2009).

Can you explain the idea of Proxemic System to me?
It’s the same topic but instead of working on architecture I am working on views from above, adapting them to spheres. The individual is completely absent and simplified.
There will be drawings and video, but also an installation of small cement pixels, that will represent in full-scale the first two proxemic spheres.
How did you get to this idea on Proxemics?
In high school I worked on portraits then, in Fine Arts School, I started doing group images that gradually became crowds. Then I started to study our individual identity in an urban space. Little by little, I rethought my technique, my stroke, my concepts.
When I got to the idea of crowds, I started to simplify my images, taking away all the architecture and working only on the individual.
After that, I worked on greyness and lines. This idea came from a work I did in Fine Arts School, where I photographed the television, and through the process of the interval between the number of images shown per second, I got an image with a huge amount of lines that appeared, almost blurred.
Little by little the individuals lost all identity, and only their silhouettes remained.

Now I feel quite comfortable with the Vital Architecture concept but I am still not able to define it completely, to see its limits. All this comes to me plastically, as I am a visual artist, I am here to produce images, I don’t always want to know what I am doing and control it. It’s then up to each and everyone to interpret the artwork and the concepts according to his/her own perception.

Thank you Vincent.

You can discover Vincent Testard’s work at the Galerie Tinbox in Bordeaux, from the 28th of May to the 4th of July, or on his website www.testardvincent.com
http://www.galerie-tinbox.com/
Vital Architecture opens on the 28th of May at 7p.m.
Proxemic System opens on the 18th of June at 7 p.m.

Created by Alice Cavender On 03/10/09 At 11:03 AM

Shepard Fairey’s Barack Obama campaign poster is still in the news even though people now refer to the subject as President Obama. Fairey has filed a lawsuit against The Associated Press, requesting the judge to state that he is “protected from copyright infringement claims.”

The Barack Obama photograph used in the Fairey poster was taken by freelance photographer, Mannie Garcia for The Associated Press in 2006. The A.P. recently demanded a portion of any money made from the image and now the artist has decided to the let a federal judge figure out if the matter is a copyright infringement.

A lawyer for Fairey, Anthony T. Falzone said the Garcia photograph was transformed into a “stunning, abstracted and idealized visual image that created powerful new meaning and conveys a radically different message.”

NY Times has more on the copyright lawsuit. Brian over at MyArtSpace blog has a more in depth post on the Fairey case too.

Shepard Fairey is also currently showing at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.

Google Earth is an amazing tool that just keeps getting better and it’s still FREE. Over the years I have spent hours looking down on our fascinating little planet with Google Earth.

Now Google has made it even more compelling for artists to download as they’re opening museums up and taking us inside. No longer content with looking down on art museums from above, they have zoomed in on paintings hanging on the walls. They have gone in armed with some amazing technology too, revealing every crack and brush stroke on each painting.

Here’s a video of them capturing some of the 14 masterpieces from the The Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain.

To find the images I opened Google Earth and did a search for “The Prado Museum Spain” then clicked Fly To. The 14 current images that have been scanned at the Museo del Prado include..

• Artemis by Rembrandt
• Self Portrait by Albrecht Durer
• The 3rd of May 1808 in Madrid by Francisco Goya
• The Nobleman with his Hand on his Chest by El Greco
• The Cardinal by Raphael
• Descent from the Cross by Roger van der Weyden
• Emperor Carlos V on Horseback by Titian
• The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch
• Jacob’s Dream by José de Ribera
• Inmaculada Concepción by Giambattista Tiepolo
• The Annunciation by Fra Angelico
• Crucifixion by Juan de Flandes
• The Family of Felipe IV, or Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez
• The Three Graces by Peter Paul Rubens

So, if you haven’t downloaded Google Earth yet you’re missing out! I really hope this is just the start of things to come and more great art museums invite the Google guys around to photograph their paintings.

Google says “The paintings have been photographed in very high resolution and contain as many as 14,000 million pixels (14 gigapixels). With this high level resolution you are able to see fine details such as the tiny bee on a flower in The Three Graces (Las Tres Gracias), delicate tears on the faces of the figures in The Descent from the Cross (El Descendimiento ) and complex figures in The Garden of Earthly Delights (El Jardin de las Delicias)” on their Google Earth and Maps blog here.

One of the best ways to learn how to be an artist is to talk with other artists.. people that are in the trenches and know how to survive. It’s fine to listen to a university lecturer talk about being an artist, but they’re at best an artist/teacher hybrid, which is also fine if you enjoy teaching. But if you want to paint during the day and relax at night (rather than teach during the day, paint at night and have no life), you should learn from those that are doing just that.

I read artist biographies, artist interviews, collect artist quotes, and pick the brains of any successful artist that comes within talking distance of me. Artists are generally an open bunch of people that aren’t good at keeping trade secrets, so you just have to ask if you want to know something.

The Australian artist Hazel Dooney has been making quite a name for herself nationally and now regularly has works appearing for sale at major auction houses around the country. She also has one of the most interesting artist blogs online and is very open with her experiences as a working artist.

Hazel has kindly allowed me to share some excerpts from her diary. It’s a small insight into some of the challenges that an artist faces when he or she becomes a full time working artist..

A Year Of Thinking Dangerously
Excerpts from a Journal – Hazel Dooney

11th February
I was getting impatient for the base coats to dry on a large enamel piece, so I started work on a new series of watercolours on paper. I am really bad at doing nothing.
Putting down the first marks of a new work is always hell. I suffer a flood of anxiety and self-doubt, and the initial effort is always terrible. I try too hard. My lines are tight. I am hesitant about how and where to use the paint. I waste a lot of time pacing around instead of working. I have to force myself to finish the damn thing. Then I lie it face down and try to forget about it.
When I’m not happy with my art, everything in my life is fucked. When it’s going well, everything is perfect. It’s irrational and unpredictable, and it’s downright unpleasant for everyone around me.

4th April
I spent at least half this day sick or sleeping off the effects of using enamel paint. My tolerance to it has declined in the year or so since I last used it. Tomorrow morning I’m going to my favourite industrial paint store to buy a protective suit and some fresh chemical filters for my mask. I’d take a photo of myself in all that gear here but it’d feels too ridiculous. Then again, the ramifications of not taking it seriously are anything but ridiculous.
I’ve been reading about the German-born American sculptor, Eva Hesse. She worked with lethal material and was diagnosed with a brain tumour, probably caused by the carcinogenic fumes wafting around her studio. She died in 1970, aged34. I love her work: she made impermanent, unbeautiful media incredibly tender.
I think I understand – maybe too well – why she didn’t change materials even when she understood their toxicity, even when she knew, in the end, they were killing her.

15th June
At the opening of my solo show, I overheard two young women, both artists, discussing my work. One of them was visibly upset by the graphic sexuality of some of the images, and the undercurrent of violence. She wondered aloud about my mental and emotional stability. “Well, I guess we all feel that way from time to time,” her friend replied. “We just don’t feel the need to paint it like she does!” Which got me wondering, if an artist wants to avoid the conflicts and contradictions of their interior life, what’s the point of making art at all?
The conceptualist American artist, Jeff Koons insists that art has been too subjective in the past, too concerned with the messy, emotive sprawl of self-expression, as opposed to what he calls objective art, art so sanitised of the germy interior life of the artist that his or her only role in its creation is an idea. The actual making of the finished work, the elements of craftsmanship, are, for him, best left up to others, preferably others who have no real interest or engagement with the artist other than interpreting his instructions with as much technical precision as possible
I am so not into this approach. The work I’m drawn to most often – in art, photography, music, literature or film – is intensely personal and inextricable from the artist’s every day life: if anything, the more diaristic it is, especially when it comes to words and images, the better.

1st September
Lately I’ve received a lot of emails from strangers. They begin by telling me they are “fellow artists”, then, on that tenuous basis, they ask me to help them market and sell their work. I’ve been trying to figure out why I’ve found these requests so offensive, especially as I am not exactly a shrinking violet when it comes to self-promotion.
Then it clicked. There’s nothing in their emails that is actually about art, theirs or mine, and they imply that my focus is more on marketing and sales than creativity and plain old hard work.
Well, f##k ‘em. I make art not only because of a passionate desire to communicate but also a jittery compulsion to make real what resides only in my imagination. And when I have a body of work that is ready to be viewed, finding an audience for it is sure as hell very different to launching a healthier breakfast cereal or a gentler washing-up liquid. There is no demographic research you can (or should) do to identify a consumer niche. Whatever some people think (including an increasing number of critics and curators) it is not about brand development and key selling propositions.

11th October
Yesterday, I accepted three commissions for large-scale paintings which, on top of several other private commissions and exhibition commitments, have closed out my schedule for the rest of the year. I will now have to tell clients and galleries that I’m unable to look at any new projects before 2009 – and maybe later, if I decide to spend Christmas, next year, in Brazil, where I want to join a samba school and dance in one of the Carnival parades.
I am still a little gob-smacked by how quickly all this has happened. Eighteen months ago, I was working part-time in a clothing shop to make ends meet. I was living with my father and trying to recover from a debilitating mental breakdown. I hadn’t touched a paint brush in almost six months and at least a couple of artists and gallerists I knew were already talking about my career in the past sense. Hell, I was, too. There was nothing in my life then that suggested any reason for optimism.
What got me off my self-pitying ass was the opportunity to paint… a skateboard. Thanks to the American artist, William Quigley, I was the only foreigner among 75 artists and celebrities – everyone from Julian Schnabel, William Wegman and Tony Alva, to Peter Beard, Robin Williams and 50 Cent – invited to submit a hand-painted skateboard to be auctioned for the benefit of the Boarding For Breast Cancer charity. The boards were exhibited in a show entitled Style Sessions at Milk Studios on Manhattan’s lower West side and mine attracted one of the highest bids.
A month after the auction, I quit my job. I decided to leave Melbourne, too. For better or worse, I was committed to the idea that I was an artist. As I packed up my few possessions, I couldn’t help thinking of this passage from Goethe:
“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one element of truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans – that moment one commits oneself, then providence moves all.
“All sorts of things occur ton help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man would have dreamed could have come his way.
“Whatever you can do or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin in it now.”

See Hazel Dooney’s Self Vs Self blog for more of her writing and art. I have also previously mentioned her Porno exhibition and Free artist prints to download.

>> Being an Artist, Contemporary Artists, Australia

Managed to avoid the excess heat of the Dubai summer this year by spending much of July and August contemplating the infinite shades of grey and green in a very wet Europe. Got back to Dubai to find that I no longer have a job!

The project I was working on was gradually being subsumed into a government body when I left and by the time I returned it had been swallowed up completely. Apparently this is not unusual. I have since heard of other proposals and projects that are taken over and the external consultants unceremoniously dumped. However, despite being unemployed, incomeless and back to square one in the job search, I am surprisingly sanguine about the whole affair. I’m happy with what I did and the whole experience has provided a fascinating insight into the chaotic, schizophrenic and slightly brutal nature of local cultural politics. Also being unemployed does have advantages. September marks the beginning of the post summer season and all the galleries have new shows so I should have time to see them all this year!

I started a few days ago with a trip the Third Line Gallery showing its war themed exhibition ‘Roads were Open / Roads were Closed’. The Third Line is the most successful gallery in Dubai. It has the most staff, some of the most lucrative artists (like Farhad Moshiri) and last spring it opened a new gallery space in the Qatari capital, Doha. The Third Line artists are usually connected in some way to the region but may have been brought up elsewhere or lived between two or more cultures. This allows for a multiplicity of influences and interpretations – very appropriate for the global and transient nature of Dubai.

‘Roads were Open / Roads were Closed’ featured five artists interpreting either direct or indirect experience of the Palestinian and Lebanese conflicts. The exhibition’s focus was on exploring how we register trauma and perceive conflict. However, the work was also very much about how artists interpret history and preserve or package national and political as well as personal memory.

As you entered the gallery, Palestinian Layla Shawwa’s ‘Weapon of Mass Destruction’ was a striking start. The huge slingshot complete with large stone sitting on a stand in the middle of the gallery floor is an immediately recognisable symbol of military asymmetry and moral triumph. The piece and its ironic title acknowledge this standard interpretation but Layla Shawwa’s point is more complex. In the absence of any forward movement, the symbol now stands as an impotent victim of its own mythology. It becomes a memory around which an uneasy internal dialogue revolves rather than being the external symbol of strength that it once was.

Photographer Tarek Al Ghoussein is also Palestinian but born in Kuwait and living in the UAE. As a consequence he is not directly exposed to the conflict but still needs to process and interpret his connection to it. His photographs, all taken in the UAE, depict huge and featureless concrete walls reflecting both the reality of the Palestinian situation and his inaccessibility to that reality. He also photographs barren desert spaces sometimes juxtaposing the two themes. When placing himself in the images he is inevitably dwarfed either by space or by containment.

Fouad El Khoury documents a month of his life in Lebanon in the summer of 2006 when Beirut came under serious bombardment following the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers. The technique is a series of prints that show his diary page for each day. Sometimes the whole page is situated inside his house surrounded by the normalcy of household items. Other times the text is superimposed on events taking place outside the house, sometimes images familiar from news reports during that period. At the same time as news of what is happening in the nation is reported in his diary, a parallel tragedy is unfolding in his personal life as a relationship fails which makes a nice if obvious juxtaposition of the personal and the political. The whole photo series covers an entire wall of the gallery and makes an impact as both visual and emotional archive.

A very different approach is taken by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige whose multi part project ‘Wonder Beirut’ documents the earlier civil war period using the ‘Story of the Pyromaniac Photographer’. This was Abdallah Farah, a photographer commissioned by the Lebanese tourist board to take postcard images of Beirut in the late 1960s. With the onset of the civil war in 1975, he systematically burned or altered the slides and negatives he used for the postcards to reflect the damage of battle. This results in some fantastic images with parts melted and blackened but retaining postcard colour intensity at the same time. Others such as the ‘Battle of the Hotels’ show sequences of the same postcard image gradually being destroyed.

Another part of the project relates to Abdallah Farah’s many rolls of film, which were never developed, first because of a lack of materials and then out of choice. Each roll is carefully dated, some as recently as 2000, and their contents documented so you are able to read the images but not see them. This part of the project is called ‘Latent Images’. Latency is apparently an engineering term meaning the time delay between the initiation of an action and its results. So the consequences of the action remain unobserved in the present. What a perfect notion for an exhibition about conflict!

The Thirdline Gallery

http://www.thethirdline.com/

Created by Valerie Grove On 09/11/08 At 11:14 AM