STUDIOS, EASELS, & OIL PAINTS
My studio has been in many places. A studio is as much about the things in the space as it is about the space itself. The spaces can change frequently, but the furniture and tools used to create the art stick around for a long time.
I currently have a large easel, a smaller easel, a small cabinet full of drawers, a home-built open sideboard table, and a custom-built taboret crammed against part of a wall in our garage. My main easel is a sizable double-masted H-frame studio easel. We purchased it the year I started taking painting classes during my undergraduate studies. We lived in Las Vegas, and my wife and I went to Blick Art Supplies. What would become my easel was one of the larger ones they had on display, and, as these things tend to be, it was on sale. We purchased it and brought it home, where I promptly put it together in our spare room that was serving as my studio at the time. I remember it being so clean. So pristine. The wood was light and unblemished. It almost felt sacrilegious to use it, like the feeling of a blank canvas or sketchbook before you start it. Even after painting on it for my last few semesters, the easel hardly looked used.
Over the next decade, the easel began accumulating bits of paint markings from the edges of various canvases, stickers on its numerous surfaces, and, recently, large swaths of spray paint from my flailing attempts at a new medium. The first time I felt that my easel was really starting to look like an artist’s easel was when I attempted a 100-day project for the first time. My goal was to paint 100 5x7in figure paintings in oil. I had been trying to paint various portraits and figures over the previous few years with what I felt was minimal success, and I wanted to improve my comfort and familiarity with my color palette. When I reflected on the stages of my artistic journey, I realized that the times I felt I had made the most progress were when I was regularly attending life drawing sessions or classes. There is something about painting the human figure that pushes one’s abilities. I firmly believe that if one can master drawing the human form, one will be able to draw or paint any other subject.
So, I embarked on a 100-day(ish) journey of figure painting. When I first started, each painting took between 2 to 3 hours, some even longer. I would sometimes start in the late afternoon before or right after dinner for a bit and then resume after my daughter went to bed. My wife and I would put on a show, and I would paint while she watched, and I listened, struggling to mix the right colors and define the correct proportions.
My studio at the time was a small nook or alcove at the front of our living room that extended out of the wall slightly with 3 windows, like half of a hexagon. I had built a short but long sideboard table with some open shelves that fit perfectly under the window in the middle section of the nook. I used this space to store my various mediums, paints, brushes, and small canvases. The top of it was used as my main working space. When I wasn’t painting, my easel and the taboret could fit in the alcove and out of the way. But even when painting, I could pull them out and still not be in the way of the main living area. I think this was my favorite space that we lived in as I could paint and still be a part of the going ons of my family or spend time with my wife at night, rather than having to recluse. I think this was one of my more prolific painting periods.
As I continued my project, the average time for each painting decreased to 1 or 1.5 hours. I became confident in my color palette and the style that was emerging. I accepted a few landscape commissions and sold a handful of other paintings. Which naturally impacted the one-a-day timeline of these small figure paintings. During this time, my easel started accumulating more and more paint marks, and the edges were worn with use where I handled it the most. The oil from the paint and mediums sank into the wood, smoothing it out. It was finally starting to feel like a real artist’s easel.
I started spacing out the small figure paintings more and more. Sometimes, a week would go by without doing one. Then, circumstances caused us to move suddenly from our little townhouse. My new painting area was now located in our garage. I found it much harder to spend time in front of the easel. It wasn’t just a matter of sitting down and painting anymore. It felt more like work now. It was not something I could easily sit down and do when I had a spare moment or two. There was now a literal barrier between me and the easel. I was still painting, though, working on various commissions and a portrait series starring my newborn nieces and nephews. I would sprinkle in a smaller figure painting now and then, but they were fewer and farther apart. The last one I completed was #56. Not quite the 100 that I intended. But perhaps there will be time to start again. Figure paintings #54 and #55 were both painted in April of 2020. #56, in December of 2020.
It’s interesting to try and balance a traditional oil painting practice with a modern/digital illustration and design practice. The styles I’ve developed for each are very different, and I tend to ebb and flow from one to the other.
When the pandemic hit, I had to abandon my oil painting almost entirely to focus on my design and illustration practice and progress my career to support my family. At the beginning of the pandemic shutdowns, I found myself in the middle of transitioning to a new job. The offer was withheld for almost 2 months after leaving my previous employer. Luckily, I could do contract design work and find freelance illustration projects. However, this required intense focus and commitment. My easel lay dormant in our single-car garage. It was only occasionally pressed into service for an hour of painting here and there when I could find the time. These last few years have been the longest I have not practiced oil painting consistently since I began using the medium in my first painting course.
And yet, my easel is still there. A prized possession. A testament to the journey I have been on. Even as I am excited about projects like Not Really Skateboards and am pleased with my career trajectory, I am again beginning to feel the pull to my now dormant brushes. The forgotten linseed oil and turpenoid. The unheard scratch of the brush on canvas, the drying paint on the wooden palette. The intense study of the human form. It feels that Oil painting and figurative art will forever hold some mystical pull over me. As James Elkins said, “To a nonpainter, oil paint is uninteresting and faintly unpleasant. To a painter, it is the life’s blood: a substance so utterly entrancing, infuriating, and ravishingly beautiful that it makes it worthwhile to go back into the studio every morning, year after year, for an entire lifetime. As the decades go by, a painter’s life becomes a life lived with oil paint, a story told in the thicknesses of oil.”
