The Artist's Studio

I was recently in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts to see the exhibit on William Merritt Chase and was struck by a picture of his studio that had a dead swan hanging on the wall. Artist's studios are depicted repeatedly in art and I am wondering what a dead swan says about artists, their work environs, and how the world sees us. I am downloading and studying the pictures I have located online looking for common elements. The first thing that stands out is the mess. Wow! Talk about hoarders, as a profession, we've got that trait nailed. Some of it is an occupational hazard, the accumulation of props so our sitters will have something to fiddle with whilst idling away the hours on a sitting platform. We also collect furniture, dead animals, live animals (woof!), rugs (Vermeer), fans, millinery, antlers (K Kuerner), canoes (N C Wyeth), ladders (gets us up to the tippy top of a painting) and umbrellas (to shade out the pesky sun when its glaring meanly at us). There are great piles of papers and pots and pots of worn out paintbrushes, more than you could ever renovate. Poor Alexander Calder, who's main claim to fame with the general public are his mobiles, was totally hopeless. I am surprised that more artists' studios do not burn to the ground. Norman Rockwell's actually did once, but he was one of the neater ones. Go figure.

It is shocking, for some, the lack of organization. You would think that designing a painting, is essentially an act of organizing and ordering things. You would think that this translates into the physical environs, but no, it does not. We seem to need those items in plain sight, works in progress on the table top, not filed away, out of sight and out of mind, in some drawer. We are visual and need those things nearby, at hand, fermenting in our imaginations.