The Sacred Messy Space
By Mason Gehring
February 22, 2021
I’ve been thinking about how to talk about my process in the studio. I’ve been putting together information and video for our studio visits to be presented by Creative Pinellas. It’s been kind of hard for me to figure out what to talk about because so much of the process of my paintings is internal and my studio is small and cluttered and I just kept finding more questions to ask myself:
What do people want to see in my studio?
What do they want to know about me?
What do people want to know about my materials or process?
A lot of these things are pretty direct:
I paint with acrylic paint on canvas.
I sometimes sketch before I do a painting and sometimes I don’t.
Sometimes I use reference images for my paintings and sometimes I don’t.
My studio is such a sacred space and it’s an honor to share but also can be very revealing. I had some anxiety over how much I need to clean up and reorganize my space because it’s not really presentable to the public but for me, it works just fine. This pushed me to avoid figuring out how to create the video because the cleaning and organizing was too overwhelming. So I just had to let it go. I teach in this space in person and online and it’s never bothered me, why NOW does this mean so much? Again, I’m circling back to my value as an artist and the value of my work itself. It’s forcing me to either change or be ok with bringing all of these things to the forefront of the public eye. Making me make decisions about where my boundaries are as an artist? What is a professional way to present myself, my work, my space, my ideas so that there is a consensual agreement of value.
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