21. Studio Tour!
Show Notes
Big 3 Ideas from this episode:
History of the Artist’s Studio Tour
The Studio is the Mind
Meet the Artists of the San Juan Island Artists’ Studio Tour!
Francis Bacon’s last painting, Study of a Bull, 1991 (in which he uses real dust from his famously shambolic studio in London)
Claire Basler
I think of my studio as a vegetable garden,
where things follow their natural course.
They grow, they ripen.
You have to graft.
You have to water.
- Joan Miro
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Episode 21: Studio Tour!
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[00:00:00] The metaphor mindset is a podcast for artists and creative thinkers, entrepreneurs and leaders who want to explore ideas around creativity and commerce.
[00:00:25] And this is episode 21, Studio Tour. I'll be your tour guide today as we take a tour of studio tours. Talk a little bit about the history of art studios, and take a look at what we can glean from them for our own art practices.
[00:00:44] First off, I'm talking today about this subject because we have a studio tour coming up on San Juan Island.
[00:00:50] And although I've been a guest on other studio tours twice, This is the first time I'm opening the doors to my own studio in my home, my garden, and inviting the public in. It's a huge milestone for me. I love the idea of milestones.
[00:01:04] Milestones were markers used along a route to show how far you'd come and how far you needed to go. You could tell if you were on the right path and you could see your mile marker as the next step in your journey. They were brought to England the Romans, but they've been used in many different cultures in Saudi Arabia.
[00:01:24] Mile markers were tall. And almost looked like a man on the horizon, so you could see that you were going towards a destination.
[00:01:33] I've used the idea of milestones as I've built my art and coaching business. Thinking about them as the first time I've done a certain thing, there was the milestone of making my first big painting. Another milestone was taking part in an art fair, or my first solo show.
[00:01:49] My first in-person class, my first coaching client, my first blog post. You get the idea every time you reach a milestone, it feels great. At that point, you get to stop and decide. Do you want to keep going on that path? Do you want to take a turn, go a different direction, or even stop where you are and have lunch?
[00:02:10] Milestones are markers that you can use to tell your own story to yourself and to help you find your way along your path.
[00:02:18] As we go on this studio tour together, the one in our minds and the one on my island, it may help to know a little history about the idea of studio tours and the activity of a studio tour.
[00:02:30] In ancient and medieval times. Much of the 2D art like frescoes and murals were painted on site in churches, monasteries, temples, and most artists of those times were commissioned, with a connection to the church or religious order.
[00:02:44] As the Renaissance developed and the merchant class grew individual benefactors began to commission and employ artists for individual purposes. And the artists themselves started to create workshops called Bodegas in Italy that were production houses with [00:03:00] apprentices and master artists.
[00:03:01] A whole process of education and production that fit into the rising merchant classes need for imagery around their new positions in society. The studiolo. Was a separate space from the bodega. It was where the artist went to contemplate. Consider, come up with ideas. Think away from the hustle and bustle where apprentices were grinding paint, mixing glues and glazes, building frames, and doing the grunt work, so to speak, of the art making process
[00:03:30] over time, the 18th century saw the rise of the art salon, a gathering of artists and musicians and poets, mostly run by aristocratic, educated women who would gather artists together to share art, poetry, literature, and music.
[00:03:47] And the mix of philosophical and political ideas of the time. In early 18 hundreds with the rise of the industrial revolution. The French Academy was created with its atelier or art workshops. as the demand for visual imagery for personal and family history,
[00:04:04] royals and politics morphed into the idea of the artist as thinker and creator in their own right. This was really a movement. That included the literature of romanticism where art was no longer just a product or a demand for history in creating of an image, but became an expression of the individual artist, the individual voice in literature, music, drama, and art.
[00:04:30] The studio moved from being a factory where a benefactor's religious or cultural narrative was created. To a place where the artist went within to create a personal vision before showing it to the world.
[00:04:43] As galleries, rose alongside the museums of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
[00:04:51] Gallery owners would visit artist studios to see and choose work to display, as well as tend to the artist's emotional and financial needs.
[00:04:59] After World War ii, the beat art movement in New York became social and political movements. The art party with poetry readings and performance art begat, the studio tour where middle class America could pull back the curtain and, get a taste of what the bohemian life of an artist was like.
[00:05:19] Sort of a middle class slumming adventure in the last part of the 20th century. Where now artists have become their own managers and groups and neighborhood art collectives have become places where artists open their doors to welcome potential collectors and anyone else who wants to learn and enjoy an art adventure.
[00:05:38] It might also be said that the studio is an extension of the artist's mind. And the studio tour, therefore, is a movable feast of sorts through the minds of the artists showing the ways that they work, the ways that they live, and the sources of their inspiration. To me, the artist's studio has always held a mystique and I dreamed of what my studio would look like [00:06:00] and how I'd feel in it.
[00:06:01] Like the open, clear desert of Georgia O'Keefe, but full of sticks and shells and stones and artifacts like a naturalist studio with the smell of paint and color wheels staring deep into my soul, a place where I could be free to create.
[00:06:17] Be free to sit for hours and just play with color or stare at images, or think about ideas or read or draw. It was an extension of my mind and the creative force inside me that couldn't be contained, but needed a whole other room or building to expand into. So if the studio is an extension of the mind, nowhere is it more obvious than one of the 20th century's most fascinating painters.
[00:06:45] Francis Bacon,
[00:06:47] in fact. In Francis Bacon's studio, the idea of the artist's studio as an extension of the artist's mind and the concept of the studio tour, the curiosity to see behind the scenes come together in a huge, hilarious and slightly disturbing way. Bacon was born in 1909, and despite being an alcoholic and having asthma, he lived to be 82 and painted up until he died.
[00:07:17] He painted in many places, but mostly settled into a very small studio in South Kensington, London. He'd go out with friends at night and drink till all hours, but still rise early and paint in a studio that was as messy and chaotic as his work. I'm only guessing, but I imagine as his mind as well.
[00:07:37] Not many people toured it while he was alive.
His studio, not his mind.
[00:07:42] He didn't have housewives from the suburbs coming to look at his paintings like in the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
[00:07:48] But after he died and his estate bequeathed the contents to his gallery and then to the Hue Lane Gallery in Dublin, they moved more than 7,000 articles of paper and paints, brushes and boxes, the whole mess. Cataloging them with the efforts of archeologists and curators.
[00:08:09] That's the hilarious part to me. He had this mess of a studio that he did not even allow his cleaning lady to touch. And then after he died, all these people came in and cataloged every single speck of dust.
[00:08:24] Writer Christopher Turner wrote about Bacon Studio in an article he called Bacon Dust.
[00:08:29] He says " Bacon was proud of his disorderly studio, which was a kind of metaphor for the creative act." " I feel at home in this chaos he said of his workspace. Because chaos suggests images to me. I think it may be a spur to create order." Turner says On another occasion, bacon explained "I like to live among the memories and the damage."
[00:08:52] Turner interviewed Bacon's cleaning lady, Mrs. Ward, who kept his apartment tidy, but wasn't allowed to touch the studio. Bacon [00:09:00] actually used the dust in his paintings to create texture. When they move the studio, they actually move the dust too in a bag labeled Bacon Dust. So now you can go and tour Bacon's Bacon Dust.
[00:09:16] Today, artist studios range from crazy messes to pristine, curated gallery spaces that show up in the pages of Architectural Digest and are the envy of everyone on Instagram.
[00:09:27] Every studio is different. Just like every artist, every mind is different. This year I will be cleaning my studio and opening the doors on the San Juan Islands Artist Studio Tour, June 3rd and fourth on San Juan Island in Washington State. If you live anywhere else in the world, you might not even know this place.
[00:09:48] We are 12 miles as the crow flies from Victoria, BC It's about a two hour drive from Seattle and an hour and a half ferry ride from Anacortes.
[00:09:58] it's a beautiful ride if you've never been here. It's truly a gem of a place. I hope you do come up for the weekend or any weekend.
[00:10:07] On the tour, I'll have my studio, office, garden, gazebo, and garden, all full of art. You can see my native plant garden, which is a nice way of saying I cultivate the edible weeds that grow everywhere here, such as sheep sorrel, bedstraw, dandelion ,clover, and all the herbs and flowers. I plant the poppies. peony lavender Delphinium will be in bloom, and you can forage for.
[00:10:31] Mint chives, rosemary, sage, and other herbs. You can also pick up a map of the tour from my studio, which is right in the cute little town of Friday Harbor, then venture about the island to visit my fellow artists.
[00:10:44] You can see Paula West's kiln and Potter's wheel, along with a delightful little gallery in a field where her partner Joe Cooper, displays his amazing wood sculptures. You can visit the gardens and see the colorful paintings of my friend Teresa Smith.
[00:11:01] Or brave the Forest Mountain Road to Lisa Lamoreaux's studio in the woods. It's worth the drive to see the west side where you can see vista's overlooking the Salish Sea, and maybe even glimpse and orca breaching. Out of the water there are weavers, fiber artists, glass workers, painters, mixed media artists, jewelers, sculptors, and more.
[00:11:23] I do hope you come. To be inspired by how other artists live and find ideas for their studios, and perhaps take home a little bit of island inspiration.
[00:11:34] thanks everyone and have a courageously creative week. If you're an artist who wants to sell and market your work more effectively join us in the metaphor mindset studio an online program for artists who want to love their business as much as they love their art Metaphor Mindset Studio. [00:12:00] Think like an artist work like a boss.
References:
San Juan Island Artist’s Studio Tour: https://www.sanjuanislandartists.com/
Studios you can see on Google Street View: https://artsandculture.google.com/story/9-famous-artists%E2%80%99-studios-you-can-see-on-street-view/eQWBzCnO_bb6KQ?hl=en
Artist’s Studio Museum: https://www.artiststudiomuseum.org/
Artist’s Homes & Studios Organization & Tour Information: https://artistshomes.org/
A great video by Jesse Oliver of ArtLife on some of the history of the artist’s studio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zudN5pSW4EM
An article on moving Francis Bacon’s Studio, by Christopher Turner:
