Poble Nou, Barcelona
Before I went to art school, I used a room in my small, three-bedroom terraced house as a studio. My first real studio was in Barcelona, Spain, during the year that I lived and studied there for my Fine Art M.A. The English art school had rented two buildings, one in the heart of the Barrio Gotico near the Picasso Museum, the other in an old factory building in Poble Nou, the old anarchist quarter a few miles from the center. I was in the Poble Nou space, sharing the building with nine other artists. When I say factory, I mean a small workshop rather than somewhere they built cars. It was an L-shaped building faced with ochre stucco, with 25 feet high ceilings and a glass roof:
The studio building was part of a cluster of similar structures on a site about four acres in size, surrounded by a wall, forming a compound for light manufacturing that was common in Barcelona in the late 1800s-early 1900s. You entered the compound through a wide arched gate. As you crossed the cobbled courtyard to the art-school studio, there was a long low building on your left that housed the design business belonging to Mariscal, the guy who was the official designer for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. Toni, the mangy dog who lived in the compound, would bound up to greet you when you came up to the building. When you slid open the big wood door to the studio, Toni would always try and squeeze in ahead of you, so you would have to fend him off with a foot at the same time as you were grappling with this eight-foot high door.
The studio building was part of a cluster of similar structures on a site about four acres in size, surrounded by a wall, forming a compound for light manufacturing that was common in Barcelona in the late 1800s-early 1900s. You entered the compound through a wide arched gate. As you crossed the cobbled courtyard to the art-school studio, there was a long low building on your left that housed the design business belonging to Mariscal, the guy who was the official designer for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. Toni, the mangy dog who lived in the compound, would bound up to greet you when you came up to the building. When you slid open the big wood door to the studio, Toni would always try and squeeze in ahead of you, so you would have to fend him off with a foot at the same time as you were grappling with this eight-foot high door.
The downstairs space was subdivided by drywall into eight studios. There was a loft area above the main entry-room, which I shared with a Scottish guy called Eoghann. We took two walls each, and worked back to back with headphones on, trying to give each other space and not bump into each other when we stepped back to size up our work.
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| From left: me; Eoghann |
I was 31 when I went there, and used to getting up very early for work. He was 22 and came to the MA straight from his BA, and rarely appeared in the studio before late morning. So I continued my early-rising habits, and usually had three or four hours painting on my own before Eoghann arrived.
You could walk from the studio to the beach in a couple of minutes, and sit by the Mediterranean for a while before returning for a few hours more painting. I also recall that even though I was there as a painter, I also experimented with sculptural objects and even installation while I was there, placing a few things in an empty warehouse for a while and taking some juicy photos of them. The studio and the memories of a year in Barcelona are all mixed together. It was such a great place to have my first studio.
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