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A Private Look Inside The New Studio
🕑 Added 2024-01-04 21:27:29 +0000 UTCAuthor's Tier! Here's a private look into a space I wasn't sure I wanted to share yet — my new art studio, and the unfinished pieces within. Typically I only like to show work that's completed, but I'm trying to be a little more open this year, since I think it will interest people to see in what utterly unprofessional conditions I choose to work. (The vibe I am going for here is, "Baseball games wafting quietly from the AM radio in grandpa's carport. Jar of mismatched screws represents my hella crazy thoughts." )
I'm also on track to complete enough pieces for a gallery showing in 2024. I love producing them, and love getting them to readers who connect with them.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. The new Extreme Fixer-Upper has a basement — my first — in which I am finally setting up a proper painting and multimedia studio. (By "proper," I mainly mean ventilated.) At the cramped little old house I did all order fulfillment and art production in a slopey-ceilinged attic room roughly the size of an MP3, which was truly horrible. Since moving into this space a couple weeks ago I've been able to add many layers to nearly a dozen pieces at a time, my preferred working style. I'm also able to produce much larger canvases.
At any given time I have about a hundred pieces in various stages, from the first errant swipe or crooked swath of color, all the way up to the hundredth or so pass which will fill them to completion. There is no conscious, deliberate composition going on — these are cathartic stream of consciousness pieces where I just add material from "the back of the house," so to speak.
(If any of these pieces is resonating with you and you might be interested in arranging for its eventual passage to your home or psychiatry lobby, please drop me a private message.)
Comments
Chris Onstad
Excellent detail
Chris Onstad
What a nice comment! Thank you, dmf. The studio is currently at least half different and has six more new paintings underway, including an experiment with smashed inkjet toner
dmf 23
I love your workroom! Lots of that sweet sweet knolling in there, at least immediately post-organization. May your tables each keep their noble purposes. Love the paintings too -- different aspects of them remind me a bit of Gary Panter, whose work I adore, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, which, likewise. To place/see our beloved simpletons in this rich visual melange is to make of them both subject and object, form and fill.
Julie (HiDeeHoGal)
Congrats for studio space and potential exhibition. It's good to have room to spread out as well as access to outside air, especially what with paint and such.
Omurice
It’s Todd with a bleeding head wound. I bought it for Christmas 2016, I wish I could attach a photo. And yeah, it was Ray in his raspberry beret, the sweet expression on his face just pierced my heart.
Conor Nelson
Reminds me of my grandfather's basement workshop. He would keep the mis-matched screws you mention in old bottles of old spice, the tops of which he would screw permanently into the ceiling, from which the bottoms containing the goodies could easily be unscrewed. Lovely spot, Chris.
Chris Onstad
Thank you! I will still be doing the precise line-art styles that you have probably seen in the feeds over time, but these are very liberating and a deep personal pleasure to create.
Chris Onstad
I was once on a signing tour with Mr. Millionaire, and to say it permanently affected my lifestyle would be accurate.
Chris Onstad
Was that the one with Ray in Lord Fauntleroy curls and a silk beret? I just saw a photo of that one yesterday and marveled that it actually involved a technique, which was unprecedented at the time. The caboose one was a gift to an old girlfriend. Which Todd one do you have? Is it a Cocoa Buddy?
Chris Onstad
If you want to hurry the neurological erosion along, the fine people at Minwax have developed some truly befogging stains.
Kolbe Kegel
These are magnificent! I can’t wait to see more work in this style!
Oppido
That bird in Lauren's painting (black outline on the red field, bottom-right quadrant, just northwest of the signature) looks like Drinky Crow's responsible, college-bound younger brother.
Omurice
I still mourn the art that got away, I pined for Ray depicted in his finery but by the time I was financially ready he’d been sold. And Beef sitting on a caboose was another favorite. I’m really happy for you that your creative space is set up, I don’t own much original art but I’ll always take pride in my bloody Todd piece. I have few visitors to my home but I learn a lot about them by their reactions to a depiction of a bloody squirrel.
Don Rowe
I've finally asserted the built-in workbench in my garage as a laceration- and teratogenic-fume-centered space myself over the last couple of weeks. So far I have made one moderately audible electric guitar less audible and look forward to more efforts.
