STUDIO TIME(^14) | APRIL 2016
MY STUDIO IS IN MY GARAGE. IT’S A BIT OF A MESS
and there’s not much room to walk. There are giant,
wrapped paintings, kids’ bikes, a refrigerator, cornhole
boards, and an old Pontiac—a turquoise blue ’66 Catalina.
She gets half the garage. I have two tables and a miter
saw for cutting frames or messing around.
I have a pretty makeshift lighting situation in there, probably
not doing my eyeballs any favors. I’m already stressing them
out with the way I paint. I have a magnifying glass with a
light on it that I rarely use, but it helps. Some of my lines and
colors get so close together, and when you’re using a color
that’s barely different from the one next to it, and they’re
only spaced a sixteenth of an inch apart, you don’t have
much of a margin for error.
When I’m working in the studio, I’m pretty heads-down.
I usually have a fairly good game plan. In the house,
there’s a lot of art, bookcases and stuff that I can walk
by and notice out of the corner of my eye. I have more
possessions than 5,000 people should have, including
thousands of books. It’s visually appealing for me to see
the way thousands of objects look when they’re all in
a space. There are at least 80 different colors of books
in the bookcases, and subconsciously, I’ll get ideas for
color combinations. I like when things just strike me out
of nowhere, when they naturally manifest subconsciously
and spark a wildfire. The more objects that are in my
space, the more that I find these weird little moments.
I can grab a book and flip through the pages really fast,
and then walk away with three new ideas.
The house is for thinking and the garage is for getting
things done. —Dalek
DALEK
DON’T TRIP ON THE INSPIRATION
Photo by
Nick Pironio