To be sure, some parts of the job of making art can be challenging. But there is much to admire and covet in the life of an artist. You get to largely invent yourself and have the freedom to choose your work each day. And where most bosses tell their employees where they have to be while they work, an artist’s studio can be anywhere that encourages their work. Speaking of the studio, one of the things AI may be changing forever is that often-expensive and demanding requirement. For increasing numbers of artists, “studio” now means a software program that can be loaded into a laptop, tucked into a book bag or under an arm, and carried anywhere the urge takes them. With that possible—even probable—future acknowledged, there is still a role to be played by the traditional workspace, and before such luxuries disappear, we may as well check out some of them.

A good example of an artist who chooses his studio on a weekly—almost a daily—basis, is Brian Kershisnik, who, though he has workspaces in Provo and Salt Lake, still travels regularly to central Utah to work in the studio he made when he was just beginning to paint, in the pioneer-built communal hall in Kanosh. His father had been a petroleum engineer, and young Brian was raised in places all over the world, few if any of which harbored any kind of historical, Mormon connection. Kanosh—not Kanab, as many of his enthusiasts reveal their confusion when they ask him about it—connected him for perhaps the first time with the visual essence of historical Utah, while the antique structure that houses his studio, with its enormous rooms and tent-like roof, gives him the kind of room to swing a brush that most studios can’t.

A dense arrangement of found objects and devotional imagery lines the studio wall, where relic, curiosity, and raw material blur into one another.

A salvaged yoke and a crown of thorns are bound together in a spare, symbolic composition that draws on both labor and devotion.

Encased in glass, a small figurine becomes both magnified and obscured—transformed by enclosure into something simultaneously comic and uncanny.

In the Salt Lake region, meanwhile, the covetable studio space that in time has taken on the stature of myth is Frank McEntire’s salvaged slice of the military-industrial complex in Taylorsville. When he found it, at the beginning of the millennium, it was marginal at best. For one thing, the roads around it were unpaved, and when it rained (which it did in those days) they turned into the kind of mud a vehicle risked disappearing into. There was a giant, roll-up steel door that he, like most of his neighbors, found useless. It took a vision of what this huge, empty box with neither plumbing nor code-worthy electrical wiring could be and a lot of labor allocated over time and as needed to make it work.

There are at least four parts to the ideal studio, but when McEntire moved in, this one had the architecture of a giant shoebox. His current studio—nearly twice the size of the one he first occupied in the complex before relocating in 2017—has allowed those functions to fully unfold. There was another entry, what’s called a “man door,” behind which he walled off a space for a gallery to exhibit his work where it can be properly seen and contemplated away from the distractions of the workshop. Up a flight of stairs he built with the help of colleagues, there’s a room that every studio should have, but which has no generic name. Part office, part living room, it boasts comfy places for guests to sit, shelves full of books, a small sampling of the art made downstairs, and in a corner, a desk and computer. It probably should be styled the studio’s “nerve center.”

Unless their work is very much in demand, most artists have places to store their unsold work. There will also be places for raw materials. McEntire is Utah’s signature assemblage artist, and so his raw materials include the thousands of visually stimulating things he’s found over the years and not yet found a use for. These can be hard to meaningfully distinguish from the many works that are finished or in progress: especially the juxtapositions of objects he’s put together to see how they work, both conceptually and aesthetically. Most if not all artists do this. They may paint for awhile, then walk away from it and return later to evaluate what they’ve done. Writers call it “letting the work cool” until it can be seen apart from the heat of its creation. McEntire knows that the same found object could be combined with many others in lots of ways, but he seeks the one that feels just right: natural and unforgettable.

There’s an irony here in America, where Capitalism has nothing to offer independent artists. An employee of, for example, a motion picture studio may have a stable place to work year after year. Frank McEntire and the other artists who share his approach and have found affordable and adaptable places to work run a too-familiar risk. As they generate interest in their location, among their peers and the public, a form of urban renewal is taking place. The area, like SoHo in New York or the Pearl in Portland, Oregon, may become so attractive that mere artists can no longer afford to have their studios there. In the last few years, the muddy tracks around McEntire’s studio have turned into paved streets. Some occupants have moved out in search of places with more future promise. Other buildings have been torn down and replaced with “proper” studios that will never belong to or fully serve the artists that rent them. If they’re lucky, the artists who have been there for years will be cherished by their landlords, whom they may serve like so much continuing, public proof that the neighborhood still has some Bohemian charm. Or those artists who created that charm from the rawest of materials may once again have to pack up their belongings and seek a new opportunity elsewhere.

The workshop area, crowded with tools and materials, is where raw elements are cut, shaped, and tested before finding their place in finished works.

All images courtesy of the author.

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.