Insider story

We don’t need to tell you again how much we enjoy visiting artists' studios but sometimes you can get more than you bargained for. Visiting Rudi Gopas in Christchurch in the late 1970s was always a throw of the dice. Somewhere we have a tape of Rudi chanting one of his poems, 'Atom Bomb. Atom Bomb. Did I cry for you? Will I die for you?' In the background you can hear the crashing of furniture as we retreated while the artist approached gesticulating forcefully. The night before he had spent 12 hours looking at the moon through his handmade telescope and was still out there in space. On another visit a week later we sat for two hours entranced as Gopas explained the complex theories behind his astonishing galactic paintings. Here are a couple of artist studio sites that are worth a look (one and two) or you can wander around the studios in OTN:STUDIO here.

Images: artists in their studios from the top, Jonathan Meese, Chris Ofili, Camille Claudel and Sonia Delaunay