Inspired by her own occasional drawings made of her studio with works in progress, artist Michelle Weinberg has embarked on an ongoing project to collect drawings by other artists of their studios. Artists Draw Their Studios is presented by Available Space is here, the artist’s platform for presenting and facilitating artistic initiatives.
The first exhibition of Artists Draw Their Studios took place in Hollywood, Florida at the Art and Culture Center in Fall 2019. An upcoming exhibition is scheduled in October 2021 at the Kleinert/James Center for the Arts, Woodtock Byrdcliffe Guild in Woodstock, NY.
The drawings demonstrate the diverse ways that artists perceive their own work places and lives.
What is a workplace like when the conventional definitions of work and play don’t apply? At a moment when art districts are tourist destinations and artworks operate like financial instruments in a booming art market, Artists Draw Their Studios is an opportunity for the public to appreciate the intimate and eccentric relationships artists have with their own workplaces. No guidelines have been given other than that the works be predominantly drawing. Artists at different stages of their careers have been invited to participate. Some drawings are observational, others conceptual representations of a studio. Some studios may be traditional, with easels and paint-spattered rags, others may be virtual, existing only in electronic format. Some artists are always on the move, others in long-term situations tethered to their home lives. Nomadic, co-working, and telecommuting work styles have up-ended our pictures of work and workspaces across society. A pressurized directive for everyone to be more entrepreneurial has ratcheted up stress and erased boundaries of work and home, public and private. Artists Draw Their Studios will reveal how the ultimate self-directed “workers” inhabit their spaces.
The artists selected to participate in the Hudson Park Library exhibition have all experienced new and profound reckonings of their studio lives during this historic pandemic.
From Where I See....
2019
archival inkjet print
24" x 24"
My studio was always my home—a private space. Since the pandemic it has become more and more of a studio in the sense of television. I am a face on a screen; my house is a set where I perform being an artist along with occasionally making art. Sometimes, a cat breaks the spell I am casting.
Composition in Pink and Grey
2019
oil and marker on paper
12" x 16"
My studio has long been a refuge from the real world and after the onset of the pandemic and during the ensuing lockdown, I wasn't able to be there — this lasted for several months, during which time I worked on small canvases and various depictive drawings at home. Most significant was the series of shuttered business drawings, which I sold online to support various organizations I believed in like the ACLU and which managed to combine a few of my interests in painting. I'm strangely glad to have had that experience but also very happy to be back to work as before!
Studio, Montello Foundation, NV
2018
Ink on rice paper
27” x 54”
I work flat on the floor or a table strewn with water containers, wool or felt to absorb ink, an assortment of stick and bottle calligraphy inks, brushes, hand-made dispersion inks, gouache, and watercolor. Paper is stored in flat files, on shelves, and under the bed. The wood patterned floor of the Montello Foundation studio in Nevada, where this drawing was made, reappears in the weaves of brushed, dripped and poured color I have been working on since March 2020.
Surface and Space
2018
Ink and acrylic on clear film and yupo
11” x 14”
My studio consists of different spaces:
A pop up space at our home. A big floor protector mat is being rolled out as I position smaller or large formats of polyester films onto it. Diluted ink and acrylic paint are poured onto and squeezed off the surface. After the work dried I start with filigree pen drawings or simply roll it up and work on it when time permits.
Drawing outside. Lying in the gras, surrounded by nature, depicting something intriguing from my surroundings. Watching close. Observing. Extracting.
Spending time with my children, being inspired by them and their playfulness. Being able to always think and reflect about my practice and future projects.
It is up to myself to make my space for art. To choosing my environment. Either at home or outside. Having no specific allocated space. Finding a compromise. And taking advantage of the situation in the best capacity possible. We only limit ourselves. Art can be created anywhere.
Hackett Studio PA
2019
pencil on Rives BFK paper
29" x 33 3/4"
I remember that my Mother called my studio my laboratory. I liked that. It is my laboratory - a place where experimentation takes place. I come in sometimes to see if things have changed on their own. Usually not, but I do have a good sense that the paintings are anticipating their next move.
Studio Wall with Installation Photo, Wallpaper, Embroidery Pattern, Paper Ephemera, Color Charts and Dutch Paintings on Printouts
2019
Digital drawing mounted on Komatex under plexiglass
12” x 16”
In my studio I hang a range of objects on the wall and arrange things on the floor. Documenting the changing arrangement of objects and ephemera in my studio is a portrait of a moment in time for my creativity. The pictures function as images of a studio, but also a kind of curation of my wall of inspiration, love, compulsion, collections. I tend to try to repaint works that are important to me from art history, so they will show up pinned and taped, carefully hung or strung up awkwardly. I consider the work a homage to artmaking and the artists I appropriate, but also a kind of love letter to the studio. It is a depiction of the inspiration pinboard in every studio, an ideal salon wall, however ham-fisted. Sometimes I paint ephemera from my past that sticks with me, sometimes political posters from our current moment that haunt me, sometimes everyday tools and objects.
Rome Studio
2017
Ink and acrylic on asli paper
22" x 30"
I’ve worked in the same studio overlooking Williamsburg, Brooklyn for more than thirty years. During that time my view of flocks of pigeons rotating in the sky was replaced by newly built condos and an event space called the Rage Cage in which for forty dollars an hour you can destroy things. Now in this time of social distancing I’m grateful for the company of the urban life outside. As an improvisational painter whose work responds to what is around me, I use the studio as a a starting point to explore such things as the relationship between the elements of a structure and specific painterly marks, and the collapsing of interior and exterior space in a window.
Studio Corner
2018
graphite, ink, crayon
11" x 14"
I often have a dream that I am living in a house and accidentally discover another unexpected wing of the house behind an unnoticed door. Going to the studio is sort of like this. At the beginning of the pandemic, when school closed I stayed home with my daughter and didn't go to the studio for months. It was okay. I made drawings at home. But when I did go back, there it was, this unexpected extra room, literally and internally. Some closed up part of myself was still there.
Studio Survey
2015
ink, graphite, ballpoint pen, permanent marker, paint on gessoed panel
16" x 12"
The text in the painting reads: STUDIO SURVEY
Far left corner of ceiling and two walls:
Two vertical steam pipes
Radiator
Far right corner of ceiling and wall:
Truncated doorway molding
Twenty-three long paintings in a niche
Doorway in center of right hand wall:
Niche with two banks of shelves
Near right hand corner of ceiling and walls
Print of Piero Madonna
Print of Fra Angelico annunciation
Door to hallway
Click to Enlarge Image
Latch
Doorknob
Clear plastic page containing cardboard and plastic shopping bag
Near left corner of ceiling and walls:
Run of about twenty-five small paintings
Eight boxes of drawings
Two cabinets
Far right corner of room:
Chest under a tabletop with baskets of pencils and pens
On floor against far wall:
Stack of recent paintings
East Hampton Studio Floor
2019
wax, paint and photographic collage
17" x 24"
Ventilation grilles, drains, grates, bunkers, and vaults, I am comfortable with loss, with the rejected and the unplumbed. Intellectually and psychologically fluid, my subjects are unfixed, drifting between ambiguity and the actual. I draw on unsettling juxtapositions of materials and metaphors while embracing the dysfunctional and unwanted. My mutable materials, such as beeswax and paraffin, take on the qualities of antithetical elements, such as steel and wood. The drains specifically, invoke the archaeology of urbanism, industry, and the failed environment.
Studio Interior
2019
mixed media on paper
24" x 24"
The studio in this drawing was my work space for 12 years, and was a part of a community of artists and friends that was enormously supportive. The building was sold in 2019, and this drawing provided me with a way to say good bye to the space. Since the pandemic began, I have carved out work space in various rooms, porches, and even my car, which has let me incorporate my family and my neighborhood into my practice.
Starr Street Three
2018
Ink Brush Drawing
16" x 20"
In my studio, the outside literally comes in through large windows that look across Brooklyn’s lower-lying factory buildings toward the tall grandness of Manhattan. For me, this view merges with the studio interior, which in many ways feels like a giant still life. It's filled with arrangements of tools alongside collections of nature and man-made objects - this particular drawing has twigs and miniature velvet flocked birds. In all of my studio drawings, I tap the saturation of the moment with an innate curiosity and willingness to be completely and often overwhelmingly consumed with and in awe of my immediate surroundings.
The Studio and Its Double
2019
carbon transfer on mulberry paper
27 1/2" x 49"
As I work, I'm constantly resolving the physical architecture of the studio space I'm in with the virtual space I am creating in painting and drawing. The studio is my factory, my laboratory, the place where the aspects of my personal home economics get set in motion (space x time x $ = ), where my attention lingers and gets stuck on a detail which can be then extrapolated into hours and days of fantasizing, scheming, constructing, finishing. During this pandemic, it would be trivial to say my studio is my refuge. It is absolutely the air I breathe.