Insiders

The American artist Chuck Close once said, ‘Inspiration is for amateurs –the rest of us just show up and get to work’. For most artists that work is still done in a studio. A couple of weeks ago we got to visit three of them and also watch Kate Newby set up her latest exhibition in Auckland.  So here you go. et al.’s Henderson studio during preparation for an installation at the Govett-Brewster, Dan Arps in his studio in West Auckland and John Parker’s first firing after his survey exhibition at Te Uru.

Last word on studios to Philip Guston, ‘I go to the studio everyday because one day I may go and the Angel will be there. What if I don't go and the Angel comes?’

Image: Dan Arps, studio chair

One swallow a Summer makes

Hey, that looked familiar. In the seemingly endless corridor that is the MCA in Sydney were three bronze barnacle covered balloons on the floor. The last time we’d seen them was on the floor in Ricky Swallow’s studio about seven years ago in LA.  Swallow has lived in the United States for a long time now and it’s hard to recall what a major impact he had in New Zealand. Hamish McKay was a big supporter and had regular exhibitions for years while Justin Paton wrote the first major monograph on Swallow in 2004. But it’s been a while since his work has been seen in New Zealand, so it’s good to see he still has a spot in the Australian art story. You can see pictures of his studio in 2009 when the balloon sculptures were being made here on OTNSTUDIO

Image: top, Ricky Swallow work on exhibition at the MCA in Sydney and bottom Swallow in his studio, 2009 

Pre post studio post

The French artist Daniel Buren, who visited NZ to oversee his remarkable installation at the National Art Gallery in 1990, is no lover of artist studios. ‘My studio is the place where I am working,’ he claimed in October magazine decrying the studio’s ‘simultaneously idealizing and ossifying functions.’ Of course Buren, like most artists, even those of the post studio generation, still has a place to settle down and think about his work. The Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco calls his space an ‘operating centre’ and even post studio's poster boy John Baldessari works in a space that to anyone not a member of the no-studio club might well think was a….studio. All this to announce that more studio shots are now up on OTNSTUDIO. Four sets were from visits over the last couple of months - Andrew Beck, Judy Millar, John Parker and Peter Peryer – and there’s an earlier set taken in et al.’s studio in 2009.

Image: Judy Millar in her Anawhata studio, September 2016

In and out

Although we named it OTN:STUDIO ETC. most of what we have posted has been pretty much inside the studios we visited. We now have 47 artists and 130 studio visits up on the site and two photo records of artists installing their exhibitions; Campbell Patterson and, as from today, Patrick Pound putting up his exhibition Documentary Intersect  at the Adam Art Gallery in July this year. Other additions to the site for you to check out are et al.’s studio from 2008, Peter Robinson’s in 2013 and a very quick look at Dan Arps’ studio, well the work he was doing at least, from way back in 2004.

Image: et al.’s studio, March 2008

In the studio: Prague edition

The apartment where we’re staying in Prague is owned by the daughter of the Czech artist and designer Zdeněk Šputa. She rents it out as a studio apartment but, in this rare case, high up on the sixth floor with angled windows to catch the light, the studio bit is real. Canvases, paints, brushes, oddly customised tools and easels used by Šputa are still in his studio along with stacks of 1950s art mags and newspaper clippings. There are also some photographs of Zdeněk Šputa who we discovered was highly regarded as a leading Czech painter in the 1940s. From the 1950s to the 1970s though he refused to follow the state style imposed by the government and gave up painting to pursue design for architecture, stained glass and tapestries. It wasn’t until 1980 that he started exhibiting as a painter again. As this is a studio post, we can also tell you that the photos from our visit to Nicolas Jasmin’s studio in Vienna are now up on OTNSTUDIO.

Images: top, Zdeněk Šputa’s studio as it is today and below, Zdeněk Šputa at work in the studio photographed by Mike Meyer (you can see more pics on Mike Meyer's site here)

OTN in and out of the studio

In Berlin we had a chance to visit Richard Frater in his studio. Like a number of NZ artists Richard has managed to make a life in Berlin and still keep a close relationship with New Zealand recently having shown at the Adam Art Gallery, in the Chartwell Collection show at the Auckland Art Gallery and of course with his dealer Robert Heald in Wellington. Richard showed us a recent work involving an elaborate aquarium cum fountain that was in service to a live oyster quietly working away purifying the water (really). You can see the pictures of Richard’s studio here on OTNSTUDIO along with some other shots taken at et al’s studio in 2006, Peter Robinson’s in 2011 and Australian artist Ricky Swallow who we visited in his Los Angeles studio in 2009.

Image: Richard Frater in his Berlin studio

Two for one

A month ago we visited the jewelers Karl Fritsch and Lisa Walker. We’ve been to Karl’s studio before but since then Karl and Lisa have developed a new studio space in the house next door to theirs in the Wellington suburb of Island Bay. You can see the pics of both artists on OTN:STUDIO, Lisa Walker here and Karl Fritsch here.
Images: top, in Lisa Walker and bottom Karl Fritsch's studios

Patrick Pound Pics

Last month we were in Melbourne and visited our good friend Patrick Pound. Like a number of other NZ artists, Patrick has made his life in Australia and it's been a long haul to get the recognition he deserves. At the time he left New Zealand in 1989 he was one of a number of artists who were getting a lot of attention. You can see this buzz reflected in Auckland Art Gallery’s collection database where 11 works are represented. To decide to leave this support and set up shop in Australia was not easy especially when he moved from his collecting informing his practice to collecting being his practice, as he recently told Serena Bentley. 

After decades of making connections, curating, collecting, writing and lecturing, the context of Patrick's work changed dramatically when he was invited to make an exhibition as part of Melbourne now in 2014. His eccentric, eclectic Gallery of Air combining elements from the National Gallery of Victoria’s collections with his own was a huge hit. And there's no stopping Patrick from collecting or showing his collections, so there's plenty more where that came from. On OTN:STUDIO we have just put up photographs from two visits one in 2013 and one this year.

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

The inside (and outside) story

To end the week we’ve put photos from four more studio visits up on OTN:STUDIO. Hard to believe that it was nearly four years since Don Driver died and to visit the studio now is a very different experience. To protect the work sheets of plastic and plain old bedsheets now act as shrouds giving the studio an even more otherworldly appearance. This set of photographs was taken in August last year. Of all the artists we have visited none has been more generous or welcoming than Peter Robinson. You can now see photographs from a dozen different visits including this one that's new to the site taken in September 2009. Earlier still, another look inside Lillian Budd’s studio in June 2003 and as we subtitle the site ‘artists in and out of the studio’, photos of Campbell Patterson setting up his exhibition at Michael Lett in August last year.

Image: covered artwork in Don Driver’s New Plymouth studio, August 2015

Inside the studio

Here’s a catch up on some new studio shots we have put up on OTNSTUDIO.  The most recent are from a visit to Kate Newby’s New York studio three days ago. Earlier in the year we were in Michael Stevenson’s Berlin studio as he was getting ready for an exhibition in Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen (you can read more about the show here). Judy Millar was also getting ready for an exhibition when we visited her earlier in the year. The sculpture you can see in her Auckland studio was to be installed at Te Uru (some great installation shots of the show here on denizen). And finally, photos from John Parker’s studio in Oratia taken in September last year.
Image: Kate Newby in her New York studio, December 2015

Second life

As far as we know, an invitation yesterday to Robert Leonard’s exhibition Julian Dashper and friends at the City Gallery, marks just the second effort by a public museum to present a substantial body of work by this important artist since his death over six years ago. What's exciting is that this will be a different sort of exhibition to anything that could be curated during Julian's lifetime. When artists aren't around anymore, curators can often take a freer hand in developing their own interpretations and exhibiting styles. A distinctive feature of Dashper's career was his enthusiasm for working with curators, writers and other artists. This tendency is, of course, reflected in Leonard’s title for his exhibition and it also emphasises the importance of Dashper's personal energy and relationships. And it's another good reason for us to post a few photos. Some of them already appear in OTNSTUDIO but they could do with an outing here too. You can see photos taken in Julian Dashper's studio over the years via these OTNSTUDIO links 1985 | November 1986 | May/July 1988 | 1989 | March 1989 | January 1993 | November 2011

Images: top, Julian Dashper and Robert Leonard in Shane Cotton’s studio in 1994. Middle, Julian Dashper, Peter McLeavey and Ivan Anthony hanging work in Dashper’s March ‘89 exhibition at the Peter McLeavey Gallery and bottom, Julian Dashper and Mary Barr looking at Big Bang Theory paintings in his Grey Lynn studio, January 1993

Moving pictures

When we walked up the stairs to Peter Robinson’s studio a couple of months ago it was for the last time. Not for the first time gentrification has honed in on previously unwanted spaces rented out for artist’s studios. The Robinson moved was forced by the renovation of the building into expensive apartments. In New York the transformation of the areas artists have lived in-moved onto- and moved-on-again from have become some of the most sought after residential property in the world. August / September was obviously moving time here too. Andrew Beck had just moved from Auckland to a new space in Wellington, Dan Arps had taken Andrews old space in Henderson and Oscar Enberg had just returned to an old studio he had left the year before. As always OTNSTUDIO pics are available for use. If you’re using them for something significant let us know first so we can tell the artists and give you bigger files if you need them.
Images: materials packed up and ready to move out of Peter Robinson's studio

Said and done

To entertain you on your way to the latest batch of OTNSTUDIO photographs, we've looked around for some studio quotes. There's quite a range:

The portentous: The studio is a laboratory, not a factory. An exhibition is the result of your experiments, but the process is never-ending. So an exhibition is not a conclusion. - Chris Ofili

The optimistic: 'I used to empty the studio out and throw stuff away. I now don't. There will be a whole series of dead ends that a year or two down the line I'll come back to.' - Anish Kapoor

The impressed: 'Bill's studio was just one painting on his canvas or maybe a few others. But Gorky overwhelmed me with the sense of profusion. There were paintings all around. Overwhelming, I thought, I have come as the crow flies to the real artists in America.' - Elaine de Kooning 
 
The hard core: 'An artist's studio should be a small space because small rooms discipline the mind and large ones distract it.' - Leonardo da Vinci

And the idiotic: 'We allow no geniuses around our Studio.' – Walt Disney

Meanwhile, on OTNSTUDIO we've added some recent photos of Kate Newby’s New York studio from earlier this year,  et al. in January, Peter Robinson in July getting ready for his recent Hopkinson Mossman exhibition, Peter Peryer taken a month later and jeweler Warwick Freeman seen yesterday in his Devonport studio.

Image: Kate Newby at here New York home and studio, 13 April 2015

Getting the hang of things

We’ve put up a lot of studio shots on OTNSTUDIO but we also have many more of artists installing exhibitions. It’s always interesting to look at the dynamics of placing work into a gallery space. As Richard Serra once put it, “different people have different problems and different relations to the exhibition of their work.” So here to kick off an occasional series are some shots taken over the last few days of Campbell Patterson setting up his exhibition at Michael Lett from the new 'outside the studio' section of OTNSTUDIO.
Images: a taste. Campbell Paterson and Andrew Thomas installing Patterson's exhibition at Michael Letts

Drumming up visitor numbers

If you were there it's hard to believe that the first outing of the two-man band The Woollastons was over 22 years ago. Robert Leonard gives a good account. “It started as a prank. The National Art Gallery, Wellington, invited Dashper and John Reynolds to give a lecture on the work of senior New Zealand painter, Toss Woollaston, on the last day of his 1991–2 show, Toss Woollaston: A Retrospective.” You can read the rest here in Re-reading Julian Dashper’s The Big Bang Theory on Leonard's website. The site now includes a substantial selection of his writing back to 1989 with the exhibition Nobodies. Looping back to The Woollastons, we were there and photographed the event with these pics now up on OTNSTUDIO. Along with Dashper/Reynolds as The Woollastons we have also added photos taken in et al’s studio back in 2004, Shane Cotton’s in 2007 and Peter Robinson's the same year.

Studio news

Here are some new photos taken in artists' studios over the last few years. Oscar Enberg was holed up in the traditional side room of the house getting work ready for the Hong Kong Art Fair when we visited him in Auckland in March. The pics of Lillian Budd’s studio go back to 2002 with the Peter Robinson pics being shot almost exactly 10 years later. The ones of Joe Sheehan a year later in 2013.

On the subject of studios we recently spotted a studio-visit book from a different artworld, the world of traditional portrait and landscape painters. Inside the artist studio comes from the editors of American Artist, a magazine promoting traditional art practice. These are the people who can draw and paint a likeness, two traditional skills that have been put on the contemporary art back burner. And what is the ideal space for a trad stud? Turns out it’s much the same as studios for artists just out of art school back in the seventies, a room at home, in these cases with significant amount of middle class cash thrown at them.
Image: Oscar Enberg

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Skin in the game.

New Zealand’s greatest Inappropriator Rohan Wealleans (anyone who was there  must still look at the performance Wealleans's brother gave at the Queensland Art Gallery on YouTube and cringe that they all sat there and laughed) is in Thailand. Wealleans snagged a grant and is using at least part of it to learn Thai massage. So wait and watch for Rohan to return home and let his fingers do the talking.
 
Vaulting ambition 

 There’s a great Sempe cartoon about art collecting. Wellington collectors Les and Milly Paris used to have it in their gallery and you can see it here reproduced on page two of the auction catalogue of their collection (pdf here). It’s a guy talking to an art collector in a large bank vault full of crates marked Picasso, Monet etc. and he’s saying, “I had no idea you were so passionate about art.” It turns out that David Nahmad is that collector as you can see from the photograph. When asked about his relationship to the art that he keeps in a vault year after year he said, “It’s not so sad, it’s more like having children who live in Asia that I can only get to visit once a year. The important thing is not to see them every day, but to know that they exist.“ So there you are, what the hell do we all know.

Singing the blues  
  

If you ever wondered what made NZ art different, take a look at these two tarpaulin works. The one on your left was made by the American David Hammons last year and the other by Don Driver in 1978. Lookalikes for sure, but these two clearly come from different worlds. Definitely not feelalikes.

You’re an artist, of course we take you seriously  

 “Abby Tanner is content to live on her mountain creating her beautiful works of art and enjoying the peace and quiet. All of that changes when a strange golden space ship crash lands on it.” Welcome to the world of Paranormal Romance. Why are we telling you this? Because an important subsection of this very important category features artists as heroes and heroines, like Abby. Want to catch up with the cream of this crop? Then get yourself S E Smith’s Abducting Abby (Dragon Lords of Valdier, #1), Christine Feehan’s Spirit Bound: Sea Heaven/Sister of the heart #2 (“Judith Henderson was an artist on the rise—an ethereal, and haunted woman whose own picture-perfect beauty stirred the souls of two men who have made her their obsession”), Soul Catcher by Leigh Briger featuring “the tormented journey of folk artist Livia Belane, who has been stalked through many lives by a sadistic and vengeful demon”. Otherwise you can graze at the top end of this excellent genre with Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife. More (so many more) here.

OTNSTUDIO  

 Joe Sheehan is in Wellington at the moment working on his Cenotaph project. A couple of weeks before he came down we visited his Auckland studio and the pics are now up on OTNSTUDIO. So too photos of a recent visit to the et al. studio in Henderson where work for a show in the Netherlands was being finished. Then on the way back down the island we caught up with Peter Peryer and, while we’re at it, there are some new artist portraits up too.

Images: Abstracts in the et al. studio

 

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Shorts
 
Upgrade: The Monica Brewster Trust deed has stood the Govett-Brewster in very good stead since the 1970s keeping renegade councillors at bay and allowing the only sensible deaccessioning policy in NZ. So why, you might ask, would anyone fiddle with it when doing that requires going to the High Court? Word is that the G-B wants to change its brand and as a by-product its name. No, not as you might think to the Len Lyceum but, following the Dowse, it wants to cut out that gallery bit and call itself a museum.

Toot suite: A new gallery for Wellington! Ok,well a revamped old one as Suite leaves its attic premises above Peter McLeavey Gallery. The newcomer is in Upper Cuba Street and opens 19 February.

 

Covered:  You can see what Rohan Wealleans made of the Marilyn statue statue he’s been hoarding and that featured on OTNSTUDIO here on Instagram.

Fountainhead: In the sole funny moment in Adam Curtis’s latest documetary Bitter Lake, an art historian attempts to teach Afghanis about Marcel Duchamp’s influence on contemporary art. “When this art emerged it was partly political,” she tells her bemused audience. “It was designed to fight against the system.”

What artworks see

A while back there was a flurry as the meme ‘What art works see' rushed through the internet. It was simple enough. Take a photo from the point of view of  a sculpture or painting following its line of sight. It was a funny idea and some of the results certainly made you remember The Gaze Wars of the 1970s and 1980s. We of course did a few at the Auckland Art Gallery. You can see them here.

Trust me

The Monica Brewster Trust deed has stood the Govett-Brewster in very good stead since the 1970s keeping renegade councillors at bay and allowing the only sensible deaccessioning policy in NZ. So why, you might ask, would anyone fiddle with it when doing that requires going to the High Court? Word is that the G-B wants to change its brand and as a by-product its name. No, not as you might think to the Len Lyceum but, following the Dowse, it wants to cut out that gallery bit and call itself a museum. 

Pot shot
Sometimes when an exhibition has just shipped out, an artist’s studio can be just plain empty. That was not the case when we visited Daniel Malone's at the McCahon House residency studio after his exhibition had opened at Hopkinson Mossman. The drawings for the show were still there along with ideas for new work and a few relics.  
Image: Daniel Malone in the McCahon House Residency studio with a can of McCahon paint of choice, Solpah paving paint.

  Dicks
It’s been a while since the NZ Herald spent all those column inches on Michael Parekowhai’s proposed lighthouse sculpture. Now there’s a new kid in town to oh-and-ah over. Gregor Kregar's Grey Lynn work Transit Cloud prompted at least two shock-horror stories and this inspired summary on NZH online:
• Collaborative work meant to resemble clouds.
• Locals say it resembles a penis.
• Council says art is controversial and subjective.
 

I will need words
Here are 27 of the 340 words Webb’s used to describe the highlights from their last sale: captivate, catapulted, celebrated, competitive, excess, exceeded, ferocious, finest, flagship, formidable, galvanizes, high, highest, highlight, important (twice), major, masterpiece, productive, regard, rich, staggering, seminal, significant, strong (twice), surpassed.

Inside out

OTNSTUDIO has only been possible because artists have not only allowed us to photograph in one of their most private places but also make those images free to anyone who wants to use them. A few have not been happy with the idea and have either asked for us not to release photos or not to take them in the first place. We initially thought this would be the default position as the process is pretty intrusive and some of the information (what people are reading, what’s lying around on desks) can be unintentionally revealing. But the cumulative result is incredible as you can see from the 10 photographs taken in various studios Peter Robinson has worked in over the last 21 years (On OTNSTUFF there are some larger versions of these images). You can see more images from these visits to Peter Robinson on OTNSTUDIO along with a new set we are putting up today from 2006. This latest batch of studio shots includes a new artist to OTNSTUDIO the Wellington painter Simon Morris who we visited a few weeks ago in his spectacular Lyall Bay studio. New to the site are shots taken in Lillian Budd's’s studio in 2003, Michael Smither in 1983 and our great friend the ceramic artist John Parker at work in 2011.

Images: left to right, top to bottom, Peter Robinson’s studio 1993, 2003, 2004, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2014