The Home Studio Experience
Submit To Love artist Billy, talks us through a typical Friday morning on Zoom, as we gather online for one of our weekly Home Studio sessions.
Between 10.50 and 11.00 every Friday, around fifteen faces start to pop into the Submit to Love Zoom Room one by one. It's like watching people arrive at a party. Some of the faces you know, some you don't. All of them shine with expectation. The happy greetings multiply as the screen fills. Calvin's hair is wild today, Ken can't find the audio hookup. We really are becoming quite familiar with Sandra's cooker.
Pretty soon Michelle brings some order and describes the prompt for today's session. In the months since the pandemic locked us all inside our homes, our projects have cruised the waterfront of established art. Abstracts, life-drawing, colour, shape and scale, this is the art equivalent of a book group. Still lives are popular and always result in a range of fascinating images. And one day Headway staffer Kat turned up with the session's subject, her household pet, Mr Lizard, who was the size of a shoe and has a deadly look in his eye.
Mr Lizard by Sam, Mike, Billy and Sandra
As each artist gets busy making their image, conversations kick off and wander around. This is normally when my attention drifts from drawing to listening. We all reveal small things about our lives. Each artist makes a piece that is undeniably THEM, but you still never quite know what you’re going to get at the end of the session. When we all show our work to wrap up the session, the most common reaction is surprise. Wow! We all saw the same thing in so many different ways. And the studio session being online seems to add to the excitement of the moment. It is the dramatic Big Reveal.
Studio artist Chris Miller thrives in the Home Studio. He drills his beady eyes into a static plant and sees it as a disabled plant, with a walking stick. He sees the tears of a clown in a happy smile. He sees awkward scraggy details in a profile – ears and nostrils become key points of interest. And the images always carry a joke somewhere, a reason to break into a smile.
Some of Chris’s artwork from a Still Life session
The other standout feature of Chris’s weekly appearance in the Home Studio are his continual snacking and the break-neck speed with which he works. Most of us spend the hour perfecting as best we can one picture. In the same time Chris will have made six images, all different, of the same subject. He drops each one to the floor like Bob Dylan in the video for Subterranean Homesick Blues.
The expression “same but different” not only describes the work we produce during our online Home Studio sessions it describes the studio experience. Once upon a time we all sat in the same place, doing our thing together. Now we all sit somewhere else, doing our thing. Together. Differently various.