Years ago I setup a studio in a second floor bedroom, which seemed like a good idea at the time. I covered the carpet with drop cloths to keep it clean, but now we are replacing all the carpet because it's old and has noticeable wear and tear elsewhere on the same floor. So I've been taking apart the bedroom studio (as well as the other rooms) for the new carpet installation. This painful and traumatic emptying naturally leads me to wonder if it's time to re-think not just the studio layout, but everything about what happens there. Imagine finding a subject that one could keep painting and re-inventing, one painting leading to the next painting. This happened to Philip Guston when he started doing his crazy cartoonish paintings. Jean Renoir writes about his father: "He told me one day that he regretted not having painted the same picture--he meant the same subject--all his life. In that way, he would have been able to devote himself entirely to what constituted 'creation' in painting: the relations between form and color." Giorgio Morandi is an example of doing this. In any case, I'm just thinking, but not too hard.
The accompanying painting is not the bedroom studio, but another studio space that I share with two other artists. I painted it four years ago in January. 16 x 20 oil on panel.
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