Recreation

In the mid-1970s, Philip Clairmont was living with his wife Vicki and daughter Melissa in Waikanae, about 40 kilometres from Wellington. Phil used the single car garage as a studio and often expanded into the living room. Every few weeks we’d drive out to spend the day with them, look at the work and occasionally watch him paint. Like one of his favourite painters Francis Bacon, Phil preferred to work in enclosed spaces under incandescent light and, like Bacon’s studio, Phil’s spaces were a clutter of reference material, paints, pots and half finished work. To see anything you had to pick your way through an undergrowth of past projects, drawings, photographs and painting equipment layered over paint spattered floorboards, protective corrugated card or, sometimes, carpet. Now that Francis Bacon’s studio has been packed up (thousands of photos were taken to ensure that every item could be replaced in its exact location in the clutter) and put on display in Dublin at The Hugh Lane, researchers are starting to sift through the debris. Pages out of magazines that have direct relationships with Bacon paintings are being discovered. One example shows how Bacon literally translated an illustration of a plucked and trussed chicken from a page torn from The Conran Cookbook directly to one of his canvases. While too much time has passed to do the same thing for Philip Clairmont, these photographs, taken in late 1974 in the living room at Waikanae, give a taste.

Other OTN stories on artist studios
Replicating artist studios
John Panting at the Royal College
Artists and their studios
Chinese artist studios