Joseph Hartman Considers the Studio as Art

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The artist’s studio, in the popular imagination, is a place of exceptional myth and, as a consequence, one of potent cliché. Romanticized depictions of these wombs of creativity dominate popular culture’s notion of artistic production – more so, often, than the art itself. Think of the 2000 film Pollock, where Ed Harris dripped and splattered his way to immortality either in the chilly gloom of a downtown Manhattan loft, or amid the glow of sunlight leaked through loose barn-board, or Joan Allen tracing the lissome curves of an enormous orchid in 2009 under the gentle arc of adobe walls as Georgia O’Keeffe.

Real studios are much less mythic – places of work, of deadlines, of frustration, of endurance. They are less places of mystery than places of production, where things get made and, more than occasionally, destroyed. But most artists – those with a studio practice, at least – will tell you the romantic view isn’t entirely false. Studios develop with the artist, a relationship that produces a character of its own. As a reflection of the personality of their occupant, they’re often as true a mirror as you’ll find.

Joseph Hartman, the Hamilton-based photographer, set out four years ago to see what his lens might capture in these hives of artistic production. It was a natural draw, having grown up amid the broad canvases made by his father, the renowned Canadian painter John Hartman. The project evolved rather than emerging fully formed; some years before, he had taken images of Toronto-based Chris Temple’s studio, and found them interesting enough, but then moved on to other things. A commercial job a few years later shooting John Scott’s studio in Toronto jogged his memory: As a crew tidied the artist’s famously untidy space to make it picture-perfect, Hartman realized its natural state was far more captivating. And so, the project was born.

Since 2013, Hartman has shot the studios of more than 120 artists across Canada, a selection of which are showing at the Peter Robertson Gallery in Edmonton from Sept. 21 to Oct. 10. There’s little to unify the project, beyond the broad rubric of its subject: A handful of images show the artist him or herself, like Duane Linklater or Shuvinai Ashoona. Some are shot square and tight, others wide and loose, angled off to one side.

What each achieves, though, is a telling portrait of its subject, whether the artist is present or not. The confines of Calgary-based Chris Cran’s workspace reveal a devotion to organization mirrored in Cran’s recent, tightly controlled small-scale conceptual portraiture. The image suggests the work is the product of personality and spatial concerns. By contrast, Hartman’s picture of the light-filled Montreal space of Valerie Blass captures the loose, insouciant experimentalism of its occupant in its array of materials and sculptures in various states of completion, languid in a cool bath of natural light.

Almost any artist will tell you the studio is less a workplace than a silent partner in the making of their art. Familiarity imparts a certain freedom, a cultivated space in which ideas can grow naturally (many artists I’ve spoken to liken their studios to being inside their own brains). With such comfort comes limitations, though, both creative and physical; Charlie Bierk, a Toronto painter of monumental portraits and one of Hartman’s subjects, told me the scale of his works were limited specifically by the dimensions of his studio door. Familiarity can also breed contempt, as the saying goes, which helps explain the global circuit of residencies, where comfortable confines can be escaped, and exhilaration renewed.

At the Toronto Star, I began a weekly series in 2015 about studios, prompted by curiosity much like Hartman’s: I wanted to pull back the veil, as it were, and show readers that works that appear as if by magic on the pristine walls of the city’s galleries were, in fact, the product of endless hours of labour, angst, and often, a very big mess. It required a portrait of each artist in their space, and an array of detail images that elaborated the intricacies of their environment. When I had to abandon the series last year, one artist urged me to continue. It wasn’t the profound revelations about these cradles of inspiration that had so captivated him. “I love looking at other people’s stuff!” he said.

There is, no doubt, a slightly illicit appeal to Hartman’s project – we size up the dimensions not of the space itself, but of an artist’s character and personality: Janet Werner’s high-ceilinged studio, piled high with page after page of reference material; Mary Pratt’s compact desk and easel, mirroring the extreme close-up observation her work demands; the abject chaos of Attila Richard Lukacs’ hectic, seductive mess; or the vaulted cedar beams of Robert Davidson’s workspace, expansive and flooded by skylights with golden sun, echoing his work’s spiritual grace.

A common criticism one hears about close examination of the artist’s studio is that you’re indulging in wistful cultural archaeology. Much art is now made on laptops or produced at fabricators in the messy post-industrial corners of our cities, and exploring studios is wilful rose-coloured nostalgia at odds with the present moment.

That’s what the directors of Pollock or Georgia O’Keeffe might have been playing at, and it’s a fair complaint. Art has gone in every direction since the iconic early and mid-20th century studios of Brancusi, Arp, Morandi, Pollock, Bourgeois, Bacon, Picasso and onward. And studio photography has always been a popular thing, which partly explains both its romanticism in the public imagination, and the occasional disdain it prompts. Situating it so firmly in such a place denies art’s fragmented evolution.

All of this is true. At the same time, we live in a physical world, where objects will never cease to be relevant, and the manipulation of material into objects, whether for practical reasons or for aesthetic pleasure, is as old as humanity itself. Hartman’s images resonate not because they startle with their originality, or impart a shock of newness. Rather, they offer a kind of communion, demystifying the making of art by revealing its crucible to be as earthbound as any of our own pursuits, and the product of plain-old hard work. They comfort with the fact that, in our increasingly digital lives, there is still much of value in the sumptuous physicality to be found right here on earth.

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