The Perfect Workspace
Artist Ideas for Common Nonsense
The Abstract Algebra of Workspace(s)
I will gladly turn 36 years of age later this month. I will wear my 36 years’ worth of battle-scars proudly. I have been painting for upwards of 30. You see, it already makes very little sense.
We all finger-painted in kindergarten, right? Yes, we did, but we weren’t all third-generation painters. When you come from a long line of artists, kindergarten is not kindergarten, it’s your workshop. It’s your home away from home. It’s the office. It’s where you go work on art during the day so you can come home and work on art till bedtime.
Hey, I’ll never deny the great privilege. Never. I come from a long line of commoners, too. Common mortals. It’s hard to believe, I know. One would think I was the product of intercourse between warring factions in the royal courts of the gods: Venus, Saturn, Mercury, Mars, the Sun, the Moon, and a White bull having a party under the banquet-table.
I have just set up my newly acquired banquet-table. I am building the perfect workspace, a project literally 20+ years in the making. Here are my thoughts on the question of building the perfect artist’s workspace:
- One needs space. One needs a room, a space, to build the studio.
- The space will serve as Atelier (Studio), Library (Books), Archive (Documentation, Reference Material, Personal Archive), Storage Facility, Place of Consort, Research Lab, Production Studio, Media Library, Museum, Artist’s Gallery, amongst other things.
- One needs proper furniture: Desks, Bookshelves, Filing Cabinets, Storage Bins, Easels, Fans, Proper Lighting, and so forth.
- One needs to be able to live in it, but ideally one should have a separate place for sleeping. Separating the place for sleeping and the place for working is quintessential. More on that at some point.
- One needs the workspace to exhibit Extreme Modularity, meaning the space can be quickly transformed into anything imaginable to humankind that can fit in the same amount of physical space and can be transformed in linear time O(n) in the best case.
There are other requirements, like art materials and so forth, computers and audio equipment, but those are the basics without which one cannot even begin contemplating the idea of having a proper workspace to fulfil one’s vocation in life if it involves an art practise.
Ideas Need (a) Room To Grow In
Presumably, you chose a room with a ceiling, a floor, and walls. Hopefully, it has a large-enough window facing in the direction that maximizes the amount of daylight flooding in. A ceiling window is great to have, but hard to find a room with one at a decent price. In any case, one needs proper lighting and if you even think of painting outside of midday, you need really good lighting.
Lighting matters. The type of lighting matters. The type of bulb matters. The normal everyday run-of-the-mill light-bulb (indoors) tends to give a yellowish hue to everything it touches. Under normal, everyday circumstances, one could care less about this and most people wouldn’t even notice or be able to see the difference when told about it.
To a visual artist, though, this skewed or biased hue makes all the difference in the world. This is why one needs several different sources of lighting as well as different kinds of lighting appurtenances.
I’m a painter and so I like to think of my workspace, like my work, in terms of optics. Modularity of the Room means it allows me to quickly set up a still life composition on a table somewhere either to take pictures or an actual still life study directly on the canvas. If I get the sudden desire to set up a bowl of fruit and so forth for a still life, I need to be able to assemble it quickly. Swiftness is key in such matters.
That’s why I say that I need to be able to do X, whatever X is, in linear time O(n) in the best case. If I could do it instantaneously without taking any time whatsoever, I would be painting with my mind by projecting my thoughts on canvas. I wouldn’t waste any time setting anything up, I would just think a hundred paintings and take the rest of the year off. Go on vacation somewhere nice.
Since anything I do in the studio takes time, I like things to take linear time, meaning that the time it takes grows in a linear fashion, given the ‘input’. While these are terms from the domain of computational complexity, I find it fitting for the work that I do in my Atelier.
A note in passing. I like to use the term Atelier instead of Studio. French happens to be my mother tongue, but that is secondary in this case. I like Atelier for various reasons, chiefly for its sound, its meaning and its etymology.
Atelier can be translated as workshop, workplace, factory, or studio, and it is common enough for English-speakers to just call it an atelier, meaning “A workshop or studio especially for an artist, designer or fashion house.”
I like atelier because of its many uses other than just to refer to an artist’s studio or workshop. It can be any kind of workshop. It can be a place for manual labor or for some form of production. It can be a school too, with students united together under a ‘master’. And, least but not least, it can also be used to refer to a Lodge, in the fullness of the term, yes, with regard to Freemasonry.
Atelier stems from the Old French word attelle (from the Latin astula), meaning ‘a small piece of wood’, or a ‘pile of wood’. It ended up being used to refer to the place where woodwork was being done (1362), and eventually to refer to the group of individuals themselves, occupying this space under the guidance of a master.
Studio just means a ‘room for study’, from the Italian studio. I like that meaning too, and will still use the term, but I tend to prefer Atelier. There are other connotations associated with the term attelle, such as the Potter’s Wheel, which is significant to me (profoundly so) in many ways and leads me to this next and final section.
It’s All About The Table
Here lies the effigy of Phillippe Pot. I spoke earlier of the new banquet-table that I just brought into my Atelier. I will be making effigies on my table too, but perhaps not exactly of the same kind as seen in the image above. The point is that It’s All About The Table.
It really is. Some of the earliest forms of writing, the oldest literature in the world, was made on tables: Cuneiform script on clay tablets, for example. In fact, the French word for painting is Tableau, and it isn’t without parallel: both Table and Tableau stem from the Latin tabula, a plank, tablet, or list.
A tablet is a slab of clay used for inscription. A table is an item of furniture with a flat top surface raised above the ground, usually on one or more legs. A table can also be a matrix or grid of data arranged in rows and columns (closer to list). It can be a collection of arithmetic calculations arranged in a table or else a lookup table, such as a set of vectors perhaps (A lookup tableis a data structure created for the purpose of translating keys into values.).
So we have matrices, arrays, grids, lists, a table, tablet, board, plank, chart. In Greek, a tablet is πινακίδα, from Koine Greek πινακίδα (pinakída, “small plate”). Table is πίνακας (pínakas).
One could easily think of Registers, Catalogues, Books, the implements and tools used in making them, in organizing them. One think of other pieces of furniture, bookcases, shelving units, and so forth. What I am trying to get at is that we have come full circle: From the ancient Akkadian clay tablets to tables in relational databases.
This is what I will be exploring in the practise-as-research art project — tentatively called — The Archives Project, in my new Atelier, a project 20+ years in the making, the Project, The Atelier, & the methods & techniques involved. Please stay tuned.
