I love to look at photographs of artists’ studios in the art
magazines and on the Internet. Some of
the studios are spectacular and others are not.
All are interesting. The studios
don’t look anything like mine, and I imagine most artists would thank their
lucky stars that they don’t. I’d prefer
to see these studios in person, but I don’t get out of the house that much.
I’m still buzzing about the perfect urban studio I saw many
years ago in Midtown Manhattan on the far west side in a neighborhood known as
Hell’s Kitchen, which was a pretty seedy part of town then. I painted from the model
in that studio a couple of times with a few other artists in the early 1980s. I wish I had photographs. But I’ll do my best to recall some details of
the place, which I believe was an old horse stable that had been taken over for
use by artists.
At the time, the entrance to the building was through a
half-height, padlocked door that made you think of Alice
entering “Wonderland,” which I later thought I had done. An average-sized adult had to stoop to get
through it. The building was off a
small inner courtyard, and you had to walk up a couple of flights of rickety
stairs to get to the studio. Once
inside, the first thing you saw was a small, improvised kitchen and bathroom on the right, and a small sleeping loft on the left – all the creature comforts a painter really needs. Beyond the kitchen was a little lounge area
that was festooned with velvet drapes.
The occupant then was Leroy Van Horne, a tall, lanky, somewhat
eccentric painter who often wore his waist-length black beard rolled up and
pinned just below his chin. Leroy worked
for an “antiques” dealer on the Upper West Side, and he used to rapidly paint
full-length portraits on those wonderful old dark green, fine cotton
canvas window shades (once standard issue in NYC rental apartments), which he
sold to customers who might have thought they had stumbled across an original
Robert Henri and were counting their blessings and the profit at auction. My friend Michelle, who also painted in this
studio, recalls that Leroy always hid the hands behind the back or otherwise
ignored them in his portraits because they were “hard to paint” and it would
have slowed him down too much to include them.
One of the artists who had rented the studio previously was David
Leffel, and Leroy had taken it over from some of David’s other friends,
including the accomplished violinist and painter Phillip Parnes, whom you might
have seen in the movie “I’m Not Rappaport,” playing his violin in Central Park,
which he occasionally did in later years.
Phil’s only web presence is a listing for him as an “actor,” which he
never was. Being a lazy researcher, it frustrates me that Leroy and Phil, both excellent painters, have no online presence,
not unlike a lot of my talented friends and acquaintances from the time I was
starting my so-called painting career in the early 1980s, when the Internet was
in its infancy.
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| John Singer Sargent in his Paris Studio, ca. 1885 |
Getting back on "house tour," when the velvet drapes of the
lounge area were pulled open, the piece de resistance of the place was revealed
in all its magnificence, a "starving artist's studio" straight out of the 19th Century
-- right down to the pot-bellied stove.
It was probably the size of Sargent’s elegant Paris
studio, if not larger.
The unobstructed north light windows started about chest height, as I
recall, and went all the way up to the 20-foot-plus ceilings. The natural light was glorious. The first time I went there, one of the
artists sharing the studio space was painting a low tabletop still life with a
couple of pots and one white onion against the far brick wall about 30 feet from the
velvet-draped entrance. That onion
absolutely glowed like the finest diamond in the world. The sight was so thrilling that I knew that
the only light I ever wanted to paint in was natural light. And I’ve pretty much kept that promise I made
to myself on that day. I must add,
unfortunately, that the light I work under does not come close to the kind of
natural light you can only get from such an expansive interior environment. But at least it’s comfortably natural, the
best light for seeing the true color and form of things.
Except for the pot-bellied stove providing heat in the
winter, that old-fashioned studio was perfection itself to a late-blooming artist
still harboring romantic notions about the life of a painter.
Some 20 years later, I was fortunate to pay a short visit to
another perfect studio in an entirely different setting. This one sits in nearly total isolation in picturesque
“Cornwall Hollow” in the Northwestern Connecticut woods
near the Massachusetts border. The large, perfectly proportioned studio is a
former Baptist church that was built in 1844.
Right across the country road from the church there is a cemetery with
graves of the deceased dating back to the Revolutionary War. When the sun goes down it is totally black
outside, with only the sound of crickets and coyotes to disturb your sleep, I
imagine.
The studio, with a small attached building on one side for
living quarters, is owned and occupied by Curt Hanson, an outstanding landscape
painter with ties to the Boston School
of painting through study with R.H. Ives Gammell. Hanson paints serene, faithful, tonalist
landscapes of New England and Thailand, where this devout Buddhist now spends
part of the year. Many of his New
England landscapes are all-season views of the “hollow,” which he
can see perfectly from the large windows of the studio. The historic building, named “Cornubia Hall”
by the previous owner, is pictured and described on his website: www.curthansonpaintings.com.
I still dream about studios like these, but reality
interferes. I believe I will be stuck in
my rent-stabilized home studio till the end of days. It’s not such a bad studio for painting
pictures from life of modest scale, no bigger than 24 by 30. But the pictures keep piling up year after
year, and I’m running out of storage space in my 12 by 18 foot monastery. I’m not keen on paying an exorbitant monthly
rent on a cubicle in a storage warehouse to stockpile the paintings I keep making
at a rate far exceeding my rate for selling them. And I hate the job of taking canvases off
their stretchers and rolling them up or storing them flat. I’ve already got about 150 20x16 inch portrait
sketches from members’ painting sessions Saturday mornings at The Art Students
League affixed flat to plywood boards. I
could just close my eyes and toss them all in the garbage, I suppose. I already toss plenty of rejects on a regular
basis as it is. But I’m a sentimental
hoarder of too many of these paintings. So
what to do?
I assume this is a problem almost all artists have, but the
pictures of artists’ studios that I like to look at seem never to include a
clear view of what their studio storage facilities are like. There are more than enough art instruction
books, and all the authors are happy to tell you, in some detail, in close, repetitious
harmony, how to clean your brushes, choose your colors and mediums and painting
surfaces, and show you all the stages of a painting, along with a lot of other
serious tips for making better paintings.
But they never say anything useful about where they put all their
paintings before they are shipped to some high-end gallery. I wanna see a few pictures of storage racks,
not just paintings! I’ve seen plenty of
them already.
Well, actually, at least one artist did have some valuable
advice on the subject of storage. The
English painter Bertram Nicholls (1883-1974) had a neat storage rack built
along one long wall of his studio at a convenient height so it could store
frames and canvases and double as a work bench.
Nicholls described it as “a large shelf about a yard wide…supported on a
double series of inch by inch uprights four to five inches apart.” His storage
solution is similar to the racks used at many of the art schools and galleries.
He included a photo of it in his 1938 book
“Painting in Oils,” which was part of the practical “How to do it” series
published in London by The Studio
Limited. Nicholls thought of everything
in this fascinating little book.
So I’m paying a young sculptor/carpenter to design and build
another wooden storage rack to fit into some unused space about 9 feet long
above a rack similar to the one Nicholls wrote about that I had someone build
for me a few years ago. I already have a
couple of those industrial, metal shelving units covering the opposite long
wall of my studio and have just added two more smaller units. This new wooden storage contraption will be
designed to accommodate my current use of the countertop for, among other
things, a place to dry my wet paintings parked diagonally against the wall.
Here are some pictures of the studio as it looks now, with
brushes and other stuff shoved into my 6 by 14 foot painting area next to the
window to make way for the carpentry project. You might find the images
amusing.
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| Will be lowering Shelves for more Canvas Storage |
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| New Wooden Rack built on platform will leave some needed wall space |
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| Opposite long wall covered with metal storage units |
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| Two new metal units just added |
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| Painting area near window now storing supplies |
