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

The truth is out there

We were in Auckland – the place desired by a surprising number of people given where it is – last week. The city may be the worst in the country when it comes to picking a new slogan, but it sure knows how to present contemporary art. Two of the best shows we saw both featured artists who live off shore and who have both chosen the United States as their new location. Strangely, both of them have also chosen to show all or part of their exhibitions off-site from their dealer gallery spaces (Hopmoss and Letts). It gets spookier. Both Fiona Connor and Kate Newby (yes, they’re both women too) are also featuring the commercial brick making industry as a central theme.

Images: top and bottom left ,Fiona Connor at her Hopkinson Mossman exhibition and top and bottom right Kate Newby's at Michael Lett

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

Room to move

Where do you go to see some contemporary NZ art? Los Angeles is one place thanks to a project being run by artist and cultural entrepreneur Fiona Connor. In her space Laurel Doody (ok front room) in midtown LA, she has presented some outstanding projects and developed an intimate style of conversations around art that is all her own. Laurel Doody has attracted a surprising amount of attention and commentary in LA with its casual seriousness. The mode tends to installation but graphic designers, film makers and writers are in the mix and the windows are determinedly kept wide open to the street in case something interesting blows by. 

Kate Newby certainly made the most of this inside-outside (and very LA) flow. When we were there a few days ago a wind chime was suspended between the tree outside and the kitchen window, the front of the main room was partly covered in a couple of hundred ‘Newbyed’ bricks, and honey-coloured wax stained with pollen from stamens puddled on the floor. Connecting other artists to facilities, materials and conversations is what Connor prides herself on. She and Newby worked at the last remaining brickworks just outside LA making custom bricks for the Laurel Doody work. Bricks were taken off the production line to be drilled, scraped, inset with glass and metal, chipped, abraded and then returned to the line for firing. The results are fluid as the various materials react to each other and leaves and bugs from outside find new places to settle. Next month Nick Austin has the space. 'So where do the 200 bricks go?’ we asked Fiona. 'Nick’s show will be rad', was the answer.

Images: Kate Newby installation at Laurel Doody

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

In the lunchroom...

...at the Dowse Art Museum, thinking about Kate Newby

On the beach

As people who lived through many performance works in the seventies and eighties we're not quick to respond to a temporary installation on a beach in freezing conditions and wind-driven rain. But it was Kate Newby who we admire and the curators were Claudia Arozqueta and Rodrigo Azaola, so what’s to do? As it turned out it would have been a big mistake to miss Newby’s installation Laura, Lucy, Mark and Felix. And the stormy day was the perfect setting for the delicate interventions into the beachscape. For a start the wind chime that Claudia hung between the beach wall and a piece of driftwood she wedged into the rocks was sounding its way right through the half hour we were there. Being a Kate Newby installation there were also lots of other things to find including introduced rocks and some glass shapes that looked liked they’d been washed up in a storm. Rodrigo and Claudia will install the work each day at 5.30pm until next Tuesday so, looking at the long range forecast, there are opportunities to see the work in just about all the different weathers Wellington throws at us. You can check out all the installations in the series here at Modelab