Praeterita

The Wicker Park Studio (staircase at right) My current studio is in an arrondissement of Chicago called Wicker Park. It’s the East Village of the City of Big Shouders. It’s the Notting Hill of the Windy City. If you want trendy bars, bijou clothes shops, artists’ studios, artists’ collectives, small independent galleries, dozens of hipster hangouts, places to make and listen to music, then Wicker Park is the place for you. ‘So,’ I hear you ask, ‘what are you doing there — you who prefers to listen to Mahler and Richard Strauss while wearing your brown knitted cardigan and slippers?’ In 2007, when I was looking for a studio in Chicago, I was in several exhibitions that all took place within a few hundred yards of each other in Wicker Park. Rather than the youth-orientation angle, I was attracted to the vibrant local art scene, and the proximity to larger commercial galleries just a few miles nearer the Loop. I found a 300 square foot studio for a decent price near Damen and Divis...

In 2002, Patty and I bought a house in Mount Carroll, a small town about 140 miles due west of Chicago. One of the reasons we bought it is because it has a small barn building at the back, which I intended to turn into a studio. It's a good size: about 25 feet by 25 feet on the ground floor, plus an attic area. It had been used as a garage by the previous owners. Then, when the old guy died, his widow lived on in the house for several decades, and gradually the little garage-barn started to come apart a little. The roof needed to be replaced, the interior wall spaces were filled with thousands of dried insect carcasses, and the dirt floor had been churned up by groundhogs. The first thing I did was to move my large Dickerson Combination Printing Press out there: Between 2004 and 2007, I would spend weeks at a time in Mount Carroll, either preparing for shows of my prints that came thick and fast in those years, or remodelling the barn. In that top photo, all the windows, the ...

The main workshop at the CPC When I moved to Chicago for good in February 2002, I got in touch with a printmaking workshop that I had visited for a few months in 2001, called the Chicago Printmakers’ Collaborative . The CPC is run by a great printmaker, musician, and artistic entrepreneur called Deborah Maris Lader. It’s in a two-storey building under the El tracks on Chicago’s Western Avenue, near a vibrant area called Lincoln Square. It’s a fully equipped printmaking workshop, with two large presses, big work tables, a screenprinting room and an aquatint/etching room. When I first started using it, there was a small exhibition space at the back, but Deborah converted that into small studio spaces. I never rented an actual studio there, preferring to pay the monthly membership fee and work in the open printmaking area. But at the time, from 2002 to 2004, I was lucky enough not to need a day job, so I was at the CPC virtually every day, which is why I think of it as one of my studio...

London Fields, Hackney, London In the summer of 1995, I moved into a three-storey Victorian house in Hackney, a down-on-its-luck borough in east London. Without knowing it, I had moved into an area awash with old factory buildings that either had been or were in the process of being converted to artist’s studios. I found a space in a huge structure that had once been a tanning factory, and it was only five minutes’ walk from my house across a stretch of parkland called London Fields (Martin Amis wrote a novel of that name, though it has nothing much to do with the area). The building had about thirty studios, and it was owned and operated by Space, an artists’ organization set up in the early 1970s by, among others, famous op-artist Bridget Riley. They wanted to provide cheap, subsidized studio space for London artists, and 25 years later they had several buildings in the east end, where property prices were still low and there was an abundance of empty space. The building I was ...

Not actually my studio in Reading, England, but pretty close to the one I talk about Reading, England When I returned to England and completed my MA, I realized that I didn’t want to go back to painting in a a converted bedroom, so I obtained a studio in the town where I lived, about 40 miles west of London. It was in another small industrial space, near the River Kennet. Like many buildings in Reading, it was constructed from solid red Victorian brick, and it had windows running the length of each room. I was on the second floor, in a long room about 25 feet long, with whitewashed stone walls and half-moon windows on two sides.  I rented this space from about October 1994 to July 1995, when I moved to London. I moved in all the canvases and materials that had been shipped back from Spain, and spent the winter and spring continuing with the large, Anselm Kiefer-like impasto semi-abstract landscapes that I had begun during the MA. The space was unheated, but the weather is nev...