I recently described how I spent some months working in the studio of the late Heinz Koppel when Peter and I stayed with our friend Pip while we were between houses. A studio is a deeply personal space. It was an act of immense generosity by Pip when she invited me to set up shop in Heinz’s. To begin with I felt quite constrained. The ‘painting stack’ lining one wall contained his work, carefully wrapped and stored. The shelves were full of his books and objects he’d selected to put on display. I used his easel but had to be careful not to wipe my brushes on it in the way I do in my own studio. (You can see the mess my easel is in here.) Gradually I settled down and started to work. I blu-tacked my drawings to the walls. The high horizon lines visible from the horizontal, slot-like windows, crept into my paintings.
Here are a small handful of works made in 2006 while I was guest painter in Heinz’s studio. The wooden object in all of them is a fragment of an old yoke that Pip thinks Heinz found somewhere and brought inside. I liked it so much I painted it over and over again. There’s a definite tone to this work that I’m quite sure was down to being surrounded by all things Koppel. I’ve produced little quite like it since.
You can click on Meri’s Beast to bring up a larger version of it.
Meri’s Beast
The Ghost of an Ox Visits the Broken Yoke
Blue Mermaid
The ‘Ghost’ in The Ghost of an Ox and the ‘Beast’ in Meri’s Beast is a tiny porcelain figure made by my friend Meri Wells. The ‘Mermaid’ in the third painting is a blue-glazed earthenware ‘salt kit’ that I made with Pip’s help in her pottery workshop. This is how it looks in reality.
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Callum’s poem is fabulous, Clive, thank you, and thanks for the good words on my Qarrtsiluni piece. Hope you find the Mark Rowlands book.
Abe Books hasn’t let me down yet Lucy. Since the marvels of internet searching my dream list of hard to find books has been whittled down most satisfactorily. I loved your Seven Healing Saints piece on Qarrtsiluni. Readers can find it HERE.
I’m challenged, Clive, by both you and Dave. Showing your workspace is courageous, but showing it intimately and explaining its influence and impact on your art is even more profound. So much of my work is outside, though, hence I’m left wondering how one can compare such apples to oranges…
But aside from my own petty ramblings, I do find great joy in the recurrent nature of your surroundings as they manifest in your paintings. It’s especially energetic to see how something as simple as a bit of wood in the room can become something repeated, something inspirational, something that drives creativity. Even more interesting is the idea of “doing one’s art” in the space of someone else, where alien and different become usual and influential, where a shared universe changes the creativity within us. ‘Fascinating’ does little to explain it…
It’s a strange sensation Jason. I write these posts as though for a few close friends. That’s really how it feels. But of course the reality is that anyone can come here and read them, though if I thought about that too much then I don’t think I could do it. I’ve always felt that the usual formal biography seems to be too far from who I am. (When I read mine it seems like another person, not me at all.) This Artlog is the antidote to that. The place where I set out to be myself and not the man reduced to a biographical check-list. A spirit of candour is my goal here.
I think a lot about what your environment might be like. You describe your world so vividly that perhaps images of it are unnecessary, though curiosity makes me wish!
Working in Heinz’s space certainly made me see things differently. He designed it and so everywhere I looked I felt as though I was looking through his eyes. However I realise that’s fanciful. Of course I never met him, though Pip’s accounts and those of his children make me feel as though I know him at some remove. And did you know that our dog Jack is the son of Pip’s Jack Russell bitch Daisy? I always think of him as being Jacket Koppel!
Those who are interested can see Pip, Daisy and Jack in Gideon Koppel’s elegiac documentary Sleep Furiously, which is available now on dvd.
This brings up so many questions and ideas. First, I love the recurrence of objects in painting, as you’ve shown us here, and the variations in scale as the objects begin to “commune” with each other on a more equal level! I love the sheep on the distant hillside, too. Dave’s comments on work spaces and your response also mirror my own gradual process of establishing myself in a new workspace after many many years in the old Vermont one. Sharing this loft with my husband is also a challenge, but I’m learning how to do it. Still, I can see it will take time and adjustment of both the physical place and my head before I’m working in it comfortably – for one thing it’s too open, though I love the light! Gotta make some areas that feel more intimate, where solitude can do its work.
It’s interesting to see this ‘workspace’ thread develop online in our various blogs. Here at Ty Isaf we hope to create a studio in the oldest part of the house. If we manage to do so it will definitely be the most beautiful workspace I’ve ever had. The present studio is not great as far as light is concerned, though with central heating now installed throughout the house, for the first Winter since we’ve been here I’m warm!
My friend Pip Koppel has a wonderful one-room living space. It has sitting areas, office, a galley kitchen, dining space and a high sleeping platform overlooking the whole thing. She sleeps under a glass pitched roof that forms one wall of her platform and gives a panoramic view over the whole valley. When in bed she looks up directly into the night sky. It must feel almost like sleeping outdoors. Small rooms off her main living space offer a second office/telephone cubicle and a w c/shower room. The whole has a light-drenched and open feeling, yet high book-shelf units on hidden wheels are used as room dividers to create intimate areas.
Beth I’m sure you’ll find ways to make your loft work perfectly. Give it your best shot and everything will come together. It’s just a matter of problem solving.
I’ve been meaning to visit for a while, seeing your comments and hearing about you at Dave’s and at Qarrtsiluni, and finally your Eijah and the Raven picture there. I’m so glad I did – and now of course I realise you did the jacket for Marly’s ‘Val/Orson’ too.
Such wonderful images here, and I especially love those of St Herve and his wolf. Do you know ‘The Philosopher and the Wolf’ by Mark Rowlands?
I look forward to exploring further…
Hello Lucy. Good to see you here. Thanks for dropping by. And yes, it was me that did Marly’s cover, a collaboration we hope to repeat some time.
I don’t know The Philosopher and the Wolf but I shall go and look it up right now. Hervé and his Wolf is a subject that rather obsesses me. The story is quite spare, but that’s probably made it possible for me to better imagine it in paint. You might be interested in the poem by Callum James based on one of my Hervé paintings. You can find it HERE.
Oh now I realise. You wrote the lovely piece on saints for Qarrtsiluni! How stupid of me for not making the connection. I really loved that. Well done.
It’s very interesting to hear such specific examples of the influence of your workspace on your art. I think this is a subject that hasn’t gotten its due until recent decades, either among artists or writers, probably due to the body/mind divorce in Western idealism: we like to believe in the purity of the “life of the mind.”
Yes, I’ve often heard people talk about how they imagine it can’t much matter what circumstances work is carried out in. If Jane Austen could bring forth her genius at a small desk placed where everyone was passing by, if the various Bronte siblings could write by lamplight at Haworth Parsonage where space was very limited, and if Michaelangelo could produce the Sistine Chapel ceiling while lying cramped atop a perilous scaffold, then surely lack of privacy, poor conditions and discomfort aren’t necessarily impediments to creativity. All that is true. I myself painted for a couple of years in a cellar where there was no natural light, and yet I was intensely happy and productive there. But equally there are places where I know I’d find it difficult to paint. I invest my work spaces with much thought and energy. I can’t function in a mess or in a place that’s too cramped. Something goes wrong for me in those circumstances. It’s a mystery.
I loved seeing your work space. Not as I imagined it, but somehow perfect!