The Artist's Studio, Part II of II
- Diamond Zhou
- Oct 10
- 7 min read
Updated: Oct 15
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SATURDAY EVENING POST
October 11th, 2025
“The studio is a laboratory, not a factory. An exhibition is the result of your experiments, but the process is never-ending. So an exhibition is not a conclusion.”
— Chris Ofili
For a certain generation of artists, the studio ceased to be a room at all. In the late 1960s, as industrial modernism reached its apogee, a new species of artist left the city for the desert, the quarry, and the salt flats. Bulldozers and maps replaced easels; geology and weather became co-conspirators. What they sought was not the absence of place but a deeper kind of authorship, one in which thought, site, and entropy shared the same address.
For Robert Smithson, the studio was an intellectual quarry. His tables overflowed with maps, photographs, and rock samples, the materials of Spiral Jetty rehearsed first as language and logistics. In Michael Heizer’s Nevada desert, the act of cutting into earth turned the landscape itself into a drawing surface. Nancy Holt worked from notebooks of astronomical calculations and horizon sketches; her Sun Tunnels aligned celestial time with human measure. Their “studios” were temporary command centers, part engineering office, part observatory, part act of faith.
What survives of these spaces are sometimes the traces: plans pinned to walls, grainy slides, letters to contractors, fuel receipts, evidence of an art that had to be both imaginative and infrastructural. Even Christo and Jeanne-Claude, often thought of as pure spectacle, spent years in a Paris apartment-studio drafting, modelling, financing, and negotiating each monumental wrapping. The real art lay in those accumulations of drawings and contracts, the quiet bureaucracy that made the ephemeral possible.
Seen this way, the wall-less studio wasn’t a rejection of the interior but its expansion. It folded planning, travel, and collaboration into the definition of artistic space. In their wake, the studio becomes something elastic: a mental map as much as a room, a network of coordinates and conversations stretching from the drafting table to the horizon line.
For James Turrell, the act of making is inseparable from calibration. His work begins in diagrams and scaled models, but its true testing ground is the body in space, the quiet experience of light as substance. In photographs of Roden Crater, we see both architecture and astronomy at work: tunnels carved through volcanic rock, measuring the movement of celestial bodies. The studio is everywhere the light meets a surface, or a gaze.
Olafur Eliasson, by contrast, transforms his studio into an experimental workshop of perception, where art, science, and ecology meet to study light and experience. In his Berlin studio, architects, engineers, and cooks work alongside artists, producing experiments in colour, reflection, and climate. Here, the studio becomes a model for society itself: collaborative, interdisciplinary, and oriented toward sustainability. The photographs of this space, mirrors, lenses, manufactured structures show light in the process of being engineered into wonder.
Anthony McCall extends this inquiry into cinema and time. His “solid-light” installations are first tested in darkened rooms where haze, projection, and geometry converge.
In all of these artists, the studio is a tuning chamber, a place where perception is measured, adjusted, and transformed into a language of quiet precision. The installations that follow are not departures from the studio but its continuation in public form: they are the studio expanded, made temporarily visible.
Here is a peek at some of our gallery artists’ studios.
Art is, after all, created in solitude. The beauty of solitude is that it grants the artist a space to think, to feel, and to receive quietly and without expectation what is given freely from the divine. The studio, in this sense, is not the birthplace of art but its second dwelling. The first is invisible, the moment of vision that takes shape in the artist’s mind before hand, pigment, or material ever intervene. Every studio is a translation of that inner world, an attempt to bring thought into matter, silence into words.
So many works never make that passage. Ideas flicker, take partial form, and vanish before they can be expressed outwardly. The floors of every studio are haunted by the ghosts of paintings not begun, sculptures never completed, words left unsaid. Yet this is the studio’s secret vitality: it holds not only what exists, but everything that almost did. It is a space of becoming, alive, fallible, endlessly renewing itself.
As we have observed, over time, the studio changes shape, as mutable as the art itself. When an artist moves, the room absorbs another rhythm; when an artist dies, it becomes an archive of presence. In the best cases, the studio survives, preserved as a museum, documented by a photographer, visited like a shrine. In the worst, it burns, collapses, or disappears, leaving only recollections and residue. Between those extremes lies the truth: the studio is always in motion, always between making and unmaking.
To walk into a studio, whether it belongs to a painter, a sculptor, or an artist who works with light or earth or data, is to step into the mind of art itself. It is where thought becomes visible, where divine whisper meets human labour. The studio endures not because it contains art, but because it contains the possibility of art, the ongoing conversation between what can be imagined and what can be made.
CURRENT
GROUP EXHIBITION
ON NOW
DAVID SPRIGGS AT PENTICTON ART GALLERY
Currently on view at the Penticton Art Gallery until October 25, 2025, David Spriggs presents two significant works. In the Main Gallery, First Wave suspends ninety hand-painted transparent layers into a towering red swell that hovers between motion and stillness. In the Project Gallery, Paradox of Power fragments the symbol of the bull into chromatic halves, exploring the uneasy tension between strength and vulnerability.
Visit the gallery at 199 Marina Way, Penticton, BC.
ON NOW
JAN HOY
AT SAN JUAN ISLANDS MUSEUM OF ART
Currently on view at the San Juan Islands Museum of Art, from September 26 to December 1, 2025, Jan Hoy’s exhibition Complex Simplicity reveals a sculptural practice rooted in restraint and precision. Working primarily in clay, steel, and bronze, Hoy refines each form to its essential gesture, exploring the delicate balance between solidity and openness. Her works resonate with the quiet rhythms of the Pacific Northwest landscape, offering a contemplative study of form, movement, and stillness that invites viewers into a state of meditative awareness.
Visit the museum at 540 Spring Street, Friday Harbor, WA
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