Julia: Sharing the Studio

I managed to meet up with Matt for lunch inspite of being very busy in the studio with preparatory drawings for my Titiian inspired Callisto painting. We revisited our old haunt the Whaling museum where Hulls famous polar bear has re –emerged after being renovated. My interest in the Whaling museum and museum quarter corresponds with my interest in Hull and its history. This is my bag as they say and also Matts. I recently visited a derelict area of Hull down by St. Andrews quay which used to house a large part of Hulls fishing industry. Now abandoned it is both sad and fascinating to see how nature is slowly reclaiming the whole area as its buildings crumble and its docks dry up. I instantly recognised it as a suitable backdrop for the aforementioned Callisto painting. The original Titian Callisto painting concerns the expulsion of the pregnant nymph Callisto from the woodland court of the goddess Diana and subsequent transformation into a bear and eventually a constellation.

You may well wonder how this relates to the studio space and my fellow artists. When I work I often find that I am taking on board issues of those colleagues in the studio. We are individually all going through some difficult issues at the moment which I don’t feel are perhaps appropriate to divulge here but what I will say is that they very much concern the three female members of the studio. Looking at the drawing I am doing I hope that it will be noticed that the image I have chosen is very much about women. I don’t always concern myself with feminist issues but at the moment they are at the forefront of my thinking. We three female artists in the studio have bonded over the last year and although our work is very different, at the moment I sense a deep seated sadness creeping into all our work.

Somehow both Callisto’s expulsion and the deserted area by the Humber have come together in my head.  I am also concerning myself with the imported plants, orchids for instance which ships like Captain Bligh’s Bounty (built in Hull) were commissioned to find. All this has meant quite a bit of research including a visit to London to the Garden Museum where Captain Bligh is buried. The secret nature of these plants found in difficult and hard to reach places reminds me so much of how often our work relates to our own hidden preoccupations. At the moment there are a lot of these in the studio I feel but by sharing them we inspire one another.

This is what sharing a studio is about not just physically but emotionally. If you want to follow my trail of thinking you will find more of it on my personal blog which is linked to this one.