Studio Untervermietung
For July and August I have my own studio!
I haven’t had a proper studio since I was in college. I’m super-excited. I’m subletting it from Claudia from backbonebooks while she’s taking a couple months off and I spent the weekend ferrying supplies and making a controlled mess of her very tidy space. The ADFC, a non-profit German cycling club/advocacy group offers free cargo bike rentals, so I picked one up on Friday and started lugging stuff over. Of course Friday was the only day of the week that it rained. Heavy cargo bike + wet roads = a lot of slow cycling, and arriving covered in either rain or sweat, or both. I am even more impressed than I already was by the parents carting around two and three kids in a cargo bike every morning.
The studio is huge, or maybe it just feels huge because it’s my first studio in a long while and I’m the only one here. Huge table, huge walls, huge potential. I moved my things in on Friday and Saturday, and was then struck by a new (to me) version of “blank page syndrome”. In your standard blank page syndrome, you open up your brand new sketchbook and are immediately paralysed.
“I could draw anything in here. I could make the most beautiful sketchbook ever. I have no idea what to draw. All I know is that I don’t want to draw poorly on the very first page”.
I figured out how to beat this a long time ago. Now I either deliberately draw poorly on the first page - maybe I’ll test a couple pens to see how they interact with the new paper, or I’ll just scribble - or I turn to the second or third page and start there. This version of blank page syndrome was “new studio syndrome”. I have so many hopes and expectations for what I’ll make here, and how this studio will change my life, and how I’ll suddenly become handsome, rich, and find perfect contentment…Well, okay, maybe I’m exaggerating some, but I’m paying money for this space, and I want it to be worth it - the money and the time.
So what the hell do I make first? A collage? A print? A book?
Borrowing a page from my sketchbook solution, I just drew a couple pages of bottle still lives, and decided I’d broken the seal. They’re hanging on the wall now.
Monday was my first full day there. Among other things I did make two new collages, and pinned up a couple more pages of warm-up drawings. By the end of the two months, there are going to be a lot of bottle still lives in this room.
