A Studio in the Old Tannery
In a building that spent a century treating leather, a painter has spent eleven years making very large, very slow work. A visit.
The smell is the first thing everybody mentions, and it has been gone for forty years. Visitors arrive at the tannery expecting something acrid and find instead cold brick, linseed oil and the particular dust of a building that is swept but never quite clean. The windows face north, which is why the painter took the lease, and why she has never seriously considered leaving.
There are four canvases in the main room. Three of them have been there, in some form, for more than two years. The fourth is finished, turned to face the wall, and will stay that way until it is collected — a habit she describes without embarrassment as superstition.
A painting is not slow because I am careful. It is slow because I am wrong for a very long time, and being wrong takes as long as it takes.
She does not photograph work in progress and asks that we do not either. The reasoning is practical rather than mystical: a photograph flattens a painting into a composition, and a composition is a thing you can judge. Judging it too early, she says, is how you talk yourself into finishing something that should have been abandoned.
The economics of a slow practice
Eleven years in one building is, in a city like this one, its own kind of achievement. The tannery was bought by a developer in her fourth year and sold again in her seventh; each time she assumed the notice would arrive, and each time the numbers on the redevelopment failed to work. She is candid that her tenure is an accident of a difficult site rather than any commitment to keeping artists in the neighbourhood.
That accident has shaped the work. Large paintings require space to stand back in, and space to stand back in is the first thing a rising rent removes. Her canvases have grown in almost direct proportion to the years she has been certain she was about to lose the room.
By late afternoon the north light has gone soft and she stops, not because the session is over but because she no longer trusts what she is seeing. The three unfinished canvases stay where they are. Tomorrow, she says, one of them will look completely different, and she will have no memory of why she thought otherwise.
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