I paint pictures of my studio wall and studio floor.
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.
My paintings depict salon scenes, collections, and studio walls filled with pinned imagery and arrays of leaning paintings from my prop collection. These pictures are derived from a fascination with cabinets of curiosity and paintings of paintings ranging from Matisse's Red Studio to David Teniers' depictions of the collection of Archduke Leopold of Austria. I am interested in a kind of comedic curation-as-painting.
In a moment when digital imagery and juxtapositions are cultural touchstones, studio making is stubbornly slower and awkward, an analogue feed with all its awkward contradictions and humbling awkwardness. I find the ham-fistedness of my execution is matched by the humbleness of working from scraps and fiber snips alongside treasured clippings and postcards, handmade things and artworks.
Why do I represent and re-present the studio? I feel a need to lionize the project of the artist, all artists, especially at a moment of great precarity and conflict. My love of studio as a refuge, bunker, or some might say dubious ivory tower, is equally tempered by what I feel is an interest in the concrete way studios suggest individual and collective wishes and dreams. It is a quiet stubborn optimism that keeps a maker making, and I wish to depict that, to share and spur my peers on as much as image my own creative endeavor. I’m just sharing my wall so I and others may make in the face of whatever comes next.