The Studio

As you can see from the pics, my little artistic environment is rather compact, cluttered, and very good for focusing concentration on the job/painting in hand.
Indeed, it is almost impossible to swing an undernourished gerbil around in - never mind a big lumbering moggy.

But then again, why anyone would make that specific exercise a universal criteria for habitability has always baffled me: why not a Yorkshire terrier or an aardvark? Lets have a bit of imagination please!

I fashioned the ‘easel’ out of an old chest of bedroom draws and a section of hardboard I cut out of the back of an ancient wardrobe many moons ago. The shelving was also ‘carpentered’ by Moi with the aid of the great God Black and Decker (I’m particularly proud of the Baroque curves).
I can tell you’re speechless with admiration…
Its Ad hoc, but hey it works and is in the make-do and mend spirit that I try to adhere to as much as possible (not always that successfully).

This little art space has been a veritable hothouse of creativity over the years…and a veritable greenhouse in high summer. Indeed, all I required was clump of birch twigs, a towel and a couple of stones and I could have rented the place out as bloody sauna.

Yay, on many a long enchanted summer evening did I toil in my underpants, my nostrils assailed by the pungent incense of linseed oil and white spirit; like Picasso conjuring sex and death in the Med I was manifesting something similar in the West Midlands - something often more disturbing and terrifying to the neighbours…if they caught a glimpse of me half-naked, sweaty and paint splattered in the Wagnerian twilight.
Lord of the Flies springs to mind at this point.

In the winter of course, its like Christmas in Vladivostock. Well, more like an igloo in Alaska really. This is the time in my annual creative cycle when I dress like an Inuit and paint like an idiot.
The central heating doesn’t extend to my little bunker so I have to wrap-up in about 4 layers of clothes.
This of course ‘retards’ my physical mobility and sometimes my mental agility too.

I escape to the warmth and safety of the living room every twenty minutes or so for a ciggy and a brew, and then with a sigh and a sad heart, I stagger back into that separate weather system like Edmund Hilary going for a Jimmy Riddle outside his tent.

Yeah, like I’m a serious artist, I mean I suffer man!
“That which does not kill me makes me stronger”.
Right on Freddy N, I’m beyond good and evil on nights like those…freezing cold, delirious and insensible: a prisoner of the artistic Will, dragging me through the ragged mountains of my human, all too human talent.

Never mind, to be spellbound and ravaged by the muse isn’t all-bad, it keeps me sane more often than not regardless of what I produce.
Anyway, I have a dream that my studio and its contents will, after my demise (a long, long time in the future), be removed wholesale and reconstructed exactly as they appear in the pic, in the MOMA in New York, or maybe Tate Modern would be okay really I suppose…at a push.

Excuse me, I’m delirious again and its not even January yet.
Heat exhaustion? Okay I’ll stop now.