its been about 2 years since i left my studio in chicago. i now live in minneapolis with my family and the fall weather made me want to start painting again.
the space is smaller than my old studio, but thats fine. i did some painting in brazil working with little to no space so its definitely possible. the new space is 300 bucks a month which is doable.
it was hard for me to find a raw space in the city. there are a lot of studios for rent but they are in refurbished buildings and a lot of times dont have windows. maybe some people prefer that but i prefer a run-down slum-lord situation where they kind of let you make the space into whatever you want.
the space i found was in a giant warehouse building complex of about 14 buildings.
this was the kind of space i was looking for. something with less rules. i dont need internet but i need free electricity. they say it gets pretty cold in the winter but i think that will be okay. it cant get below freezing or the pipes will burst so i hope i can count on that.
this is what the space looked like before i decided to paint the walls and the floor.
the painter that was there before me decided to install these aluminum braces on the walls to hang paintings from. i thought this might be cool but i ended up taking one of them down, and am probably going to take the other one down soon. they are super heavy though.
After the floors and the walls were painted, i can start making the space my own.
i found a stretcher lying around the building and re stretched it to start my first painting in the new studio.
I also grabbed some old paintings that were never finished. this is one of them.
then i did what i kind of always do when there is too much going on in a picture. i reduce the things on the canvas by covering up information and leaving shapes that look like islands on a map, of what i liked.
with this painting at a "done" state, i can hang it up to dry. it takes about 3 weeks for the oil paint to really dry.
I used the only already-stretched, blank canvas that i brought with me from my old studio to make one of my textile pieces (out of paint of course). I really only made a few of these looking back, so one more wouldnt hurt.
... but since it has masking tape all over it, i always want to pull it off. i do like this though, and maybe it is a good idea for a new series of works. ill have to figure out how to render masking take with paint, maybe that is whats up.
pulling off the tape you can see a lot was reduced. now im going to hang this one up to dry for a while, so i can put tape on top of the paint that is there, and make vertical stripes in the negative space.
I didnt realize how much my coding skills have leveled up until i decided to make a new portfolio website from scratch.
I think it will be fun to take these painting processes, and turn them into some kind of computer application. I bet i could.
Im going to be making some process videos and adding vocal narration behind it teaching people what i do. i need a bunch of different paintings going at once and to remember to film the steps each one undergoes.
maybe next studio update i will have some videos to show. in the meantime, check out my website and tell me what ya think.