Welcome to the 211th installment of A View From the Easel, a series in which artists reflect on their workspace. This week, artists move their easels to a community garden, draw inspiration from scraps art review editions, reflect on mourning and memorial as they create, and redefine the term “home studio”.
Want to participate? Discover our submission guidelines and share a bit of your studio with us! All mediums and workspaces are welcome, including your home studio (however you define it).
Charles BeckerPomona College, Claremont, California
This is my senior studio at Pomona College. Here I work on collages and assemble my greatest sculptural works. While I work I like to be surrounded by lots of inspiration, so what you see on the wall are images that have inspired me over the past few months (current favorites include Sunil Gupta, Kojo Griffin, Adrian Piper and Robert Mapplethorpe). Some of them are images I made, some of them are course materials, and the majority of them are from alumni art review volumes that I was lucky enough to find thrown away in a box at the start of the semester. This space occupies a section in a large room in which I have been fortunate to work alongside many very talented and inspiring peers. It provided a compact space for production in a charged atmosphere that sustains creative vigor.
Brianna HernandezShinnecock Indian Reservation on Long Island, New York
Aside from the bright light from the south-facing windows, my favorite part of my studio is the vibrant turquoise painted floor that I often use as a work surface. Resting on the floor are finished and partially finished sculptures of burial shrouds and coffin designs using natural materials such as moss, sand, seaweed and corn husks. Likewise, on my central worktable are urns in the making of soap and beeswax, all part of my series, Aqui Descansamos, which explores creative alternatives to memorials and funerary practices through ephemeral and living sculpture. My practice focuses on end-of-life care, grief and bereavement rituals and I find that natural materials bring new energy to these often taboo topics.
My studio is on the third floor of Ma’s House, a BIPOC artist residency and community art space on the Shinnecock Nation founded by my partner, Jeremy Dennis. This workspace that we co-manage was converted from his grandparents’ house and this particular room was built by Jeremy David’s uncle and was his grandmother’s (Ma’s) bedroom, so it there is a warm and welcoming feeling all around as I create.
This is our shared live/work artist loft in Vancouver, BC, Canada. We have designed our studio to function as both a workspace and a space where we can display our art. Our “living space” is upstairs and the ground floor is mainly our studio. We like to work on large canvases and appreciate the large, bright space to work with. We are also at street level and also have the opportunity to show our work in the showcase. We prefer to work in an uncluttered space and have built-in canvas storage tucked into a movable wall and an art table for works on paper and other mediums. We find it useful to be able to live with our art after creating it so that we can reflect, analyze and see new bodies of work come together for the exhibitions we work on. We spend a lot of our evenings looking back at the progress we’ve made that day and spend a lot of time discussing our work together. The concept of this space was to have a studio with a house inside versus a house with a studio.
After painting in a studio for many years, I transitioned to painting much more outdoors, particularly at the Red Shed Community Garden in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Being part of the community garden has been a great way to make new friends, feel connected to the community and of course grow and enjoy fresh food. I also found the garden to be a great place to paint nature from real life. I’ll bring my easel, backpack, and lunch in the morning, then work as fast as I can to finish my painting before the sun goes down. The time constraints of painting outdoors create an adrenaline rush and I think this helps me produce paintings that are as fun to look at as they are to do.
