ART Creative Spaces

An artist’s studio is often an intimate space: a place to escape from outside distractions, an environment to foster experimentation and artistic creation. An artist’s surroundings can be an influential factor in their creative process and will often mirror the aesthetic of the paintings and sculptures made in that space.

So, what does an artist’s studio really look like? In his Cannes studio, Picasso surrounded himself with an eclectic mix of paraphernalia including furniture, sculptures, ceramics, drawings and prints. In her creative universe and home, Casa Azul, Frida Kahlo kept her many pets, including monkeys, dogs, birds and a fawn. Francis Bacon’s legendarily messy workspace contained hundreds of books, catalogues, crumpled photographs, slashed canvases and empty champagne bottles, amid dusty shelves piled high with art supplies.

Following his death in 1992, the chaotic studio of Bacon, one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated artists, was preserved and later donated by his heir, John Edwards, to The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin. The entire studio was relocated to the Gallery in 2001.

Having visited the rebuilt Francis Bacon studio, Argentinian graphic artist and illustrator Max Dalton could envision a direct connection between what he saw in Bacon’s work and the environment that he worked in. Inspired by this thought, he decided to create a series of illustrations that portrayed well-known artists and the fascinating settings in which they created great art.

He describes the process he has developed: in preparation, he thoroughly researches the lives of the artists and their studios, searching for images and interesting stories that connect them to their place of work. If possible he will visit the studio and even walk around the immediate area trying to imagine how it looked like in the artist’s time. Through his research, Dalton has found that all of the studios have interesting stories behind them that relate to the art created in that space. Each intriguing illustration that he has produced is full of detail about the individual artists and the places where they found inspiration for their creative process.

This series of illustrations will make up a book that is still in production. The book will focus on the artists’ creative environments rather than the story of the artists themselves. The images shown here are just a small part of the series of artist’s studios that he is planning on including in the book. He hopes to also include Duchamp, Klimt, O’Keeffe, Magritte, Frankenthaler, Varo, Carrington, Dalí and many more.

Dalton spent six months studying under the British-Argentinean abstract painter Kenneth Kemble, but is mainly a self-taught artist. He is also an avid musician, and music has a great influence on his work and life. He studied at the School of Music of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and he plays guitar, piano, double bass and occasionally a bodhrán that he bought in a tiny music shop on a visit to Doolin in County Clare. Born and raised in Buenos Aires, and now living in Berlin, Dalton’s ancestry is Austrian and Okinawan. He works as a freelance illustrator for advertising, editorial and personal artistic projects.

‘Dalton has found that all of the studios have interesting stories behind them that relate to the art created in that space.’

Further information at max-dalton.com

far left and right: Max Dalton at work in his studio; left: Max with his Irish Red Setter, Guinness

Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol’s New York City studio, known as ‘The Factory’, had three locations between 1962 and 1984. His original studio at 231 E47th Street in New York (1962 to 1968) was referred to as the Silver Factory and was decorated from floor to ceiling with silver paint, tin foil and fractured mirrors.

The studio earned its name due to the mechanical nature of Warhol’s work. With screen printing as a primary medium; he was working on a mass scale with an assembly line of assistants. In the summer of 1964, Warhol created Flowers, a series of works that were produced at the rate of as many as eighty prints a day in a variety of sizes. Warhol worked on the large Flowers paintings himself but employed a legion of assistants to turn out an estimated 900 smaller prints.

Warhol had no interest in creating art just for the wealthy and pioneered a more commercial approach. His pop-culture subject matter appealed to wider society and enabled him to target the masses. Rather than painting every piece by hand, he would simply print his stencilled designs, allowing him to reproduce a work multiple times and churn out prints at great speed.

Yayoi Kusama

Inspired by American Abstract Impressionism, Yayoi Kusama moved from her native Japan to New York City in 1958 and was a central figure of the New York avant-garde scene throughout the 1960s, especially in the pop-art movement. There was a point when Kusama was just as popular and notorious as the likes of Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg.

The respect she had earned during the 1960s was diffused by America’s conservative political context of the 70s, so in 1973 she returned to Japan broke, disillusioned and in poor health. Hallucinations and panic attacks that she had experienced in her adoles- cence returned and she was hospitalised several times before voluntarily checking herself into a psychiatric hospital in 1977, where she still lives.

Until 2000 Kusama worked from a studio in the hospital, where she rebuilt her career. When a larger space was necessary to facilitate the quantity and scale of the work she was producing, she acquired a studio which is located across the road from the hospital and works there six days a week, where she sits in a chair and paints on a flat surface.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

American graffiti artist-turned-Neo-expressionist painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, known for his raw gestural style of painting, took the art world by storm in the 1980s. From 1983 until his untimely death, Basquiat lived and worked at 57 Great Jones Street, an East Village loft owned by his friend and mentor Andy Warhol.

A prolific artist with an innate need to create, Basquiat worked at his studio all day, every day. Collectors, graffiti kids, groupies and celebrities dropped in both by day and by night and would find a paint-splattered studio strewn with art, garbage, toys, magazines and books. Furnishings and walls were adorned with scribbles. He worked from a floor-based set-up and always liked to work with the television on. It was here that he died of an accidental drug overdose at the age of twenty-seven on 12 August 1988.

In 2016, the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation unveiled a plaque to honour Baquiat at the site of his former home and studio.

Pablo Picasso

Although he was Spanish, Pablo Picasso spent most of his adult life in France, from the time he moved to Paris in 1904. In 1946 he began to make frequent visits to the South of France and eventually moved there in 1955. The studio depicted here is at Villa La Californie, in the hills above Cannes, where he lived with his third wife and muse, Jacqueline Roque.

The villa overlooked the Bay of Cannes, with a magnificent view of the coast, and he turned the third floor into a studio. He had chosen this location because he was surrounded by the things he loved, the sparkling blue Mediterranean seas, the sunny weather and the bright light from which he drew inspiration. During his time here he created an abundance of artworks, including a series of paintings representing the interior of his new studio. It was also from here that he painted his masterpiece, The Bay of Cannes. When the construction of a new building obstructed the sea view, Picasso left Villa La Californie and moved to Mougins, where he spent his final years.

Frida Kahlo

The Blue House (‘Casa Azul’), located in the centre of Mexico City’s Coyoacán district, was Frida Kahlo’s birthplace, the home where she grew up and where she later lived with her husband Diego Rivera. It was also here that the artist died in 1954.

Frida’s many pets, including monkeys, birds and a deer, would run freely through the house. She also had a Mexican ixquintle, a breed of hairless dog with an ancestry traceable back to the Aztecs.

As a result of the horrific injuries she had suffered in a tram crash at the age of eighteen, Kahlo was not able to bear children. This pained her greatly and in many of her self-portraits Frida is accompanied by her exotic pets, which she said symbolised the children she never had.

It was here at Casa Azul that Frida and Diego entertained a host of famous guests, including US vice-president Nelson Rockefeller, composer and pianist George Gershwin, Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky and Mexican Hollywood star Dolores del Río.

Casa Azul, the intimate and creative universe of Frida Kahlo where she lived and worked most of her life, is now a museum, dedicated to the artist.

Claude Monet

In 1883, Claude Monet moved to Giverney with his second wife, Alice Hoschedé and their children. There was a barn attached to their rented house that doubled as a painting studio. The house also had a small garden in which Monet spent most of his time because of his love of plein-air painting.

When he became more successful and financially secure, Monet purchased the house and an adjacent piece of land with a water meadow. Here he planted water lilies local to France, cultivars from South America and Egypt along with exotic new hybrids. At one end of the pond, he built a Japanese-style wooden footbridge that he covered with wisteria.

A passionate horticulturist, Monet wrote daily instructions for his gardener with precise designs and layouts for plantings. The water garden became the focus of his art for the last twenty-five years of his life. He died at his home in Giverney in 1926 and is buried in the Giverny church cemetery.

Monet’s monumental canvases the Grandes Décorations, which can be seen in l’Orangerie Museum in Paris, are the ultimate expression of the symbiosis between his garden and his art.

Francis Bacon

Born in Dublin in 1909, Francis Bacon lived and worked in 7 Reece Mews, South Kensington, London, from 1961 until his death in 1992. It was in this small chaotic space measuring 6 x 4 metres that some of the twentieth century’s most celebrated paintings were created.

Bacon once said of his organised chaos, ‘This mess here around us is rather like my mind; it may be a good image of what goes on inside me, that’s what it’s like, my life is like that’. He used the door and walls as impromptu palettes and left trails of paint across the ceiling when throwing it on his canvases. He sat at his easel which was positioned under the skylight with his painting supplies to his right and photographs and other source materials on the floor to his left. The round, cracked and rusted mirror was possibly positioned for him to look at work in progress from another point of view.

Vying for floor space amid the boxes, radiators and discarded canvases were empty champagne bottles, brushes, rags, art catalogues, hundreds of creased photographs and torn pages of magazines and books that served as a stimulus for his work.

Jackson Pollock

In 1945 Jackson Pollock married fellow artist Lee Krasner and they moved out of New York City to the Springs area of East Hampton. With a loan from art dealer Peggy Guggenheim, they purchased a small house overlooking Accabonac Creek. Behind the house, there was a barn which was Pollock’s studio from 1945 until he died in 1956.

During this time he began to use pouring as his primary technique and painted his most famous all-over abstractions on the floor of the barn. He remarked that ‘having the canvas on the floor, I feel nearer, more part of the painting’. Because of his dynamic gestural style of work, paint spilt out onto the surrounding floor.

By 1952 Pollock’s paintings were selling well and he decided to renovate the studio and he had a new floor installed. When the property became a museum, the PollockKrasner House and Study Center, the floor was removed to reveal the brilliant colours that had spilt over the edges of his action paintings. Looking carefully at the marks it is even possible to see where he worked on specific paintings.