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Exploring the Creative Spaces of Famous Artists
How history shaped the artist’s journey from studio to outdoors
Claude Monet had a worn, soft-cushioned sofa to sit on to survey his wide waterlily canvases from afar.
Francis Bacon worked in a savage sort of mess, with discarded paint tubes tossed into foot-high pyramids. Frida Kahlo painted in more orderly terms, with clean white-washed walls and rows of pottery lined up on shelving. The ageing Henri Matisse made sculptures from his bed. Paul Klee had two workspaces in two different cities and delighted in returning to his “half-finished children” that waited for him each time he travelled from one studio to the other.
Every artist’s studio will be different. For a painter, there will likely be an easel, a stool, a sketchbook, a rag cloth and a painter’s palette. Rows of blank canvases might be stacked up against a wall, glass jars filled with paint brushes, some worn and brittle, others unsullied, a bottle of distilled turpentine, and the sweet smell of linseed oil seeping from the oil paint tubes, all of them squeezed, kneaded, pressed by thumbs, creased and cracked.
For the painter of landscapes, their studio is likely filled with drawings and sketches made on excursions and brought back to develop into a fully painted image. The walls might…
