- Sep 23
- 7 min read
Studios I have known, I'll give you a little tour.
I paint in the kitchen in one temporary accommodation, at a table in the living room in another. In another apartment work hangs in every room to dry. The first thing I do if I find myself moving to a new place is find a space where I can work. I don't want to work the day job hours it takes to pay for an outside studio. I work mostly part-time jobs so I have time to make art. Because I rent, I move a lot, mostly because of renoviction or the sale of the property I'm renting. Sometimes I need to move to find work or I'm looking for a better place or situation in which to live.
From the table to the attic to art school
I haven't always been a painter and drawer. Years ago, I learned from books and occasional classes to knit, sew, do macrame, tie-dye, batik, and on and on. I worked on a table in the living room. I learned to make my own patterns. I made my own clothes and clothes for my family on a sewing machine set up in a hallway, bedroom or living room, depending on where I was living. I wanted to learn to draw to be able to design patterns and clothing, so at 29, I took a life drawing course.
That was it! Not drawing for design, but just drawing. Later, I took painting classes. That drawing course told me maybe I could learn to be an artist. I drew and painted on the table in my living room. I taught myself using Nicolaides' The Natural Way to Draw, practicing 3 hours a day for years.
Later, I managed to wrangle my own room in the attic of a large house I moved into. In that attic, I made art, organized drawing sessions with friends, and taught art to children.
When I was 37, an art school opened in my town, Corner Brook, Newfoundland. I had a portfolio, and I applied. I was accepted.
Studio Balconies, kitchens, living rooms, bedrooms and garages
Since graduation, I've moved a lot and had to work in many different spaces. My first move was to a small apartment that I shared with another artist. I had a table to work on in one corner of the living room. He had his table in another corner. We invited friends over to make art on the balcony in summer.
I moved to Montreal and moved around Montreal. My first rental was a shared accommodation in an old apartment in the St. Henri district of Montreal. I worked in the bedroom.
I moved out to my own space. I wrote poetry and short stories. I illustrated them. I worked at a tiny table and a computer in a very small living room. Rent was cheap then, so I moved to a larger space. In the next apartment, I had a small separate room in which to work. I began making videos and writing poetry. I made posters for Concordia's Women's Centre events and for a community radio show that I hosted.
I moved to Vancouver and moved around Vancouver.
I was lucky to find an affordable apartment in Vancouver, let alone a space with a studio. I worked from the corner of the living room in the winter and on the small balcony in the summer. Finally, I made the bedroom into a studio and moved the bed behind a partition I constructed in the living room. In this space, I made a lot of work, some of it quite large. I had several shows of the work made here.
Here are some photos of the sweet little balcony in East Van and the view in summer. Sometimes I sat on the blue chair at a café table and painted, sometimes I sat on the chair in the other corner and drew.
A real studio again
I found a real studio again at 901 Main St., Vancouver, where I continued the work in ink, pencil, and charcoal on mylar that I developed into paintings on mylar and then ink and colored pencil on mylar. I continued showing my work here and there.
Only $150 per month in 2005 and 2006 for 150 sq feet. Yes, I'm pretty tidy, but not always this tidy.
Then, renoviction from both the studio and the apartment.
A garage studio
I found another apartment at a reasonable rent! Lucky! And this new place has an old garage I can use. Converted by just two of us, in a way that I could easily take apart if I had to move again, it's nice.
But it's cold in the winter. The first winter, I put a tarp over the living room carpet and moved the easel and rolling palette table in for a couple of months. That winter I insulated the area of the garage that was the studio. I had my own space again, and it's bearably warm now.
In this studio, I do a lot of drawing, experimenting, and commissioned portraits, and while working there, I take a couple of art courses in painting at Emily Carr University and continue to work at my job as a legal advocate in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver.
I have to take the garage studio apart in a couple of years. The house is sold and the new owners want us out and family in.
Temporary apartment sublet studio in an office
I find a temporary sublet until I can move into the new place I want and have to wait for. It has one big living room/bedroom, a kitchen, and a little office. I tarp up the little office space, set up the easel, and get to work. Here, I worked on a whole series of portrait commissions.
Converted bedroom studio/office
After four warm weather months in this really lovely space, I move into the place I've been waiting for. There is a second bedroom. I'm working on mylar again and drawing and painting on an intuitive level once more. It's good. But it's not over yet.
Kitchen studio
A few years later, the landlord is going to build a larger house on the lot. I have to move out until it's done. Another temporary move. There's a tiny bedroom and livingroom in the next apartment and a large kitchen! I move in the big studio table, the rolling palette table with room for paint supplies, an easel, and a shelving unit. Presto chango, a kitchen/studio.
New Studio under construction. Move-in time is early 2016
I'm back at the old address in a new apartment with my own room again. It is still shared in that it is the office as well as the studio, but it's an office in the morning and a studio in the afternoon. All my stuff is here, and I can keep it set up all the time.
Studio in a bag
Sometimes I paint and draw outside. I make small works, paintings, and drawings that dry more easily for transport than larger works, art that is a response to what I experience on trips and around the local community gardens and parks. I have a bag for that.
I work wherever I can and make the most of each location; it's an adventure, really. And adventures often pose of challenges. Sometimes I tear my hair out; I feel I can't work because it's the wrong environment. I do what I can to change that or to adapt until I can change it.
I'd be very interested to hear how other people make it work. Leave me a comment here or on Facebook
or on IG, or message me there. I'd love to chat about it.
- Apr 22, 2023
- 2 min read
For a few years now I've been working on two series of drawings as my main area of interest. The Birds and Plants series in ink and watercolour pencil, and a series of black and white drawings that incorporate images of birds, plants, self portraits and portraits of people I know.
The former are made with nib pen and black acrylic ink then coloured in with watercolour pencil on matte mylar. Expanses of white space play with the perception of depth and space while the graphic quality of the line suggests flattened illustration.
The latter are drawn with nib pen and ink, or with artist pens. They sometimes incorporate the human as part of nature and form an unruly pattern in black and white. These need to be looked at closely to see the imagery there.
"Birds are the last best connection to a world that is otherwise receding” Jonathan Franzen.
I spend a lot of time outdoors. I observe the toughness and the delicacy of birds and plants. Drawing them expresses my feeling of connection to nature. Nature that I see under threat. I see what is happening to the plants and to the birds because of spraying, deforestation, development and the cultivation of plants.
You can see locally any flower or other plant from almost anywhere on earth. Like the birds they migrate but in the hands of humans they are often cultivated to within an inch of what they once were, losing their smell, gaining colours that never were, nurtured by profit.
In the drawings there is an unnatural juxtaposition of the birds and the flowers that are not likely to be seen all in one place nor at one time. The human hand, mine, bringing them together.
The flowers are drawn from life, from photos I've taken myself, and sometimes from social media. Sometimes I turn to drawings of flowers in botanical books as a source for my own drawings. Many of these flowers no longer exist, lost to us like so many birds.
I draw the plants and flowers that call out to me, I choose them for their line, colour and how they work as drawings with the birds. There will be something in the droop of the plant, the spring of the stem, the attitude of the flower that feels exactly right.
The birds are always birds that I know, that inhabit my world, drawn from photographs.
- Sep 3, 2021
- 1 min read
This is a photo of my studio with the first of a series of watercolours that evolved from my almost daily drawings of plants in the drought this summer (see last post). As I walked on trails and in parks I began to notice so many young trees trying to survive. The colours of the drought are beautiful; gold, burnished reds, warm browns and still some green hanging on. They drew me in even as they felt sad.
As I worked on these paintings I tried to let go of my preconceived idea of how they should look and let the feeling of the wet colour dictate next steps as the fluidity of the watercolour took over the marks made by my brush.
In the end I am uncomfortable with these paintings. Are they too pretty in the face of the sadness of all the suffering life as our climate swings from one extreme to another?
Here is the last painting I made.
Too Warm
