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    Artists in Residence: Seventeen Artists and Their Living Spaces, from Giverny to Casa Azul
    Artists in Residence: Seventeen Artists and Their Living Spaces, from Giverny to Casa Azul
    Artists in Residence: Seventeen Artists and Their Living Spaces, from Giverny to Casa Azul
    Ebook185 pages3 hours

    Artists in Residence: Seventeen Artists and Their Living Spaces, from Giverny to Casa Azul

    By Melissa Wyse and Kate Lewis

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    About this ebook

    Artists in Residence explores the homes of 17 legendary and contemporary artists.

    Readers can peek inside Georgia O'Keeffe's adobe courtyards, stroll through Henri Matisse's vibrant aviary, and peruse Jean-Michel Basquiat's collection of over 1,000 videotapes.

    A house or an apartment is not simply     a place to eat and sleep for these artists; they transform quotidian spaces into dynamic reflections of their individual artistic preoccupations.

    • Offers a fascinating and inspiring blend of art history, interior design, and travel
    • Invites readers to peer behind the closed doors of top artists from around the world
    • Richly illustrated throughout

    Through vivid text and image, Artists in Residence explores how each artist's living space relates to their individual and distinct artist practice.

    Readers gain a deeper appreciation of their favorite artists' work, and perhaps discover a new favorite visual along the way.

    • This petite jacketed hardcover book makes a wonderful gift for artists and art fans everywhere.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherChronicle Books Digital
    Release dateFeb 2, 2021
    ISBN9781452179919
    Artists in Residence: Seventeen Artists and Their Living Spaces, from Giverny to Casa Azul
    Author

    Melissa Wyse

    Melissa Wyse is a writer and teacher, and the founder and director of Idlewild Arts. She lives in Brooklyn.

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      Book preview

      Artists in Residence - Melissa Wyse

      141

      This book emerged from a story of serendipity. Both of us (Kate and Melissa) have been fascinated by artists and their homes since long before we met one another. For years, Kate made paintings of rugs and textiles, chairs and bookcases, rooms and other interior spaces. Over time, she drew deeper into this creative exploration and painted the homes of visual artists. As she painted, her project started to feel more and more to her like a book.

      At the same time, Melissa had been making trips across the world, from France to Japan, from New Mexico to New England, to visit the homes of artists, writers, and architects. She filled pages in her notebooks with descriptions of these places and what they felt like. She did not know why, exactly, she kept visiting the homes or writing about them in such detail—only that they deepened and sometimes even shifted her understanding of each artist.

      Then, in the summer of 2017, the two of us met as resident artists at the Ragdale Foundation. Kate was working on a body of paintings, and Melissa was working on a short story collection. Several months later we serendipitously reconnected. Kate had recently created a series of painted ceramics in collaboration with her mother (who is a potter), and Melissa reached out to purchase one of these pieces for her mother (who loves art). In our email exchange about this gift, Kate mentioned all the paintings she’d been doing of artists’ homes, and Melissa mentioned all the writing she’d been doing about artists’ homes, and within days, we were on the phone, stunned by the coincidence of our shared interest and our shared sense of what this project could be and why it has meaning.

      As much as this book is a story of serendipity, it is also a story of the strange alchemy of the creative process. We both spent years getting ready to write this book before either of us knew that’s what we were doing. And we encourage everyone to follow their own curiosities, even when they don’t point in any clear direction or to any concrete outcome. Often our curiosities lead us to our most meaningful work.

      This is often true for the artists in this book. Their homes played dynamic and often unexamined roles in their creative process. For many, their homes served as low-stakes places of experimentation, giving them space, outside of their art, where they could follow their own curiosities. This book explores the ways that process can unfold, and the multifaceted interplay between these artists’ living environments and their art.

      Some of the artists in this book used their homes as places where they explored materials, staged still lifes, or inhabited the aesthetic vocabularies that would inform their artistic production. Others experienced their homes as sites of divergence, places where they stepped away from the hallmarks of their artistic work to embrace radically different colors, patterns, or aesthetic experiences. The artists in this book alternately reveled in their family life and living spaces, resisted the confining roles ascribed to domestic spaces, chose and designed homes that brought them personal and creative fulfillment, or found ways to create art in spaces over which they’d had little choice.

      Our hope is to open the door not only to homes you have heard about and maybe even visited, but also to homes and artists who may be less familiar to you.

      Some of the homes in this book belong to living artists who have active and ongoing creative relationships with these spaces. In other cases, while the artist is no longer living, their home still exists; some are even open to the public. However, other homes in this book no longer exist, because the building was torn down, sold, or transformed. The artist’s life there is no longer available for us to experience firsthand.

      Kate’s studio

      In the course of researching, writing, and illustrating this book, we were struck by how many artists’ homes have been lost to the passage of time. Too often, the ones that are lost are the homes of women artists and artists of color. With the loss of these spaces, we lose one means of connecting with these artists and their creative experiences. We hope that the pain of losing these artists’ homes spurs us all to better honor their legacies moving forward. In telling the story of art, artists, and creativity, it matters whose houses get preserved or documented, whose careers are overshadowed, how we create and refine legacy, how we remember.

      From the beginning of our collaboration, we knew that this book would not include photographs; instead, it would hold Melissa’s writing and Kate’s paintings of each artist’s home. In a world where interior spaces are relentlessly photographed, we often consider homes solely in terms of their visual appeal. Through our writing and paintings, we hope to convey not just what a home looks like, but also some greater essence of how it feels.

      Choosing to write about and paint these homes (instead of photographing them) has also allowed us to step into and reimagine homes that no longer exist. In these cases, we have done our best to research and understand each home.

      Unless otherwise noted, all of the paintings in this book emerge from consulting multiple photographs, films, or archival records of each room or object—or, when possible, from our own visits to the artists’ homes. The paintings are not exact reproductions of the homes; at times, we have homed in on, simplified, or exaggerated details in order to convey the spirit of rooms and objects. We didn’t always paint or write about the most well-known aspects of the artist’s life or home. Instead we noticed what made each of us stop and look again, the objects and rooms that offered insight into each artist’s unique view and experience, and that made us feel the electricity of connection to the artist.

      Both painting and writing are inherently acts of imagining. By engaging with these homes through the creative mediums of words and paint, we hope to invite you to imaginatively enter into the spaces for yourself, to wander through them and find your own spark of creative connection.

      We hope you come away from this book with an intimate look into the lives of these artists. Perhaps experiencing their homes will invite you to see their work in new ways or prompt you to explore the work of an artist with whom you’re less familiar.

      As you dive into this book, we also invite you to envision being in the artists’ homes. Imagine how their spaces influenced their work—and then think about your own space. What do you surround yourself with? What brings you delight when you walk into a home? Is your home calling you to be who you want to be? Are there ways you still want to experiment with your space and the objects inside it?

      Too often our culture dismisses the aesthetics of our homes as frivolous. And photographs of interior spaces are often designed to evoke admiration, as though our homes are meant for others’ consumption and approval. We suggest instead that our homes can offer meaningful opportunities for creative play. Just as the artists in this book engaged or continue to engage in dynamic creative relationships with their homes, we invite all of you to experience your homes as sites of powerful aesthetic experimentation, which may spark and fuel your creativity in other aspects of your art and life.

      As we painted and wrote about, visited, and imagined the homes of these visual artists, we felt a new intimacy with the creative life of each artist, and with some larger, collective creative experience. We hope this book will offer you a similar sense of connection to the artists and to the exploratory, often playful, and inventive process of creative unfolding.

      Melissa’s studio

      Both of us have been curious about Georgia O’Keeffe’s home in New Mexico for ages. I learned about O’Keeffe’s house when I was young and staying at an inn in Taos. One morning over breakfast, I met a newly retired couple in the midst of a long-anticipated cross-country road trip. They had mapped their route based on a few destinations they could not miss: Earlier in their trip, they had stopped in Washington, DC, at precisely the right time to see the cherry blossoms, and, just the previous day, they had been to visit O’Keeffe’s home in the town of Abiquiú. The wife told us about the landscape views out of Georgia O’Keeffe’s windows, how she had felt she was inside O’Keeffe’s paintings. They had reserved their tickets months in advance, they said; they had been planning this trip for years.

      Over breakfast, listening to them talk about their visit, I knew that I, too, would go see Georgia O’Keeffe’s house someday. It was the first time I thought that an artist’s home might open up a new creative understanding, might connect me to their paintings in such a visceral way. It was the first time I thought of an artist’s home as a place to which one might plan a pilgrimage.

      Twenty years elapsed between that breakfast conversation and the day last summer when I made my way to O’Keeffe’s house.

      O’Keeffe first

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