I recently visited the studios of two artists. Feisty, redheaded ladies with insatiable appetites for silliness and adventure and a lust for the brightest colors they can get their hands on. They are the kind of effortlessly generous women that can hardly find enough lucky targets to pour their affection onto. Both are figurative painters whose work walks right off the canvas and into the social sphere with life-sized portraits of friends and art scenes and the ways we gather. Sometimes their canvases even warp, grow a third dimension and morph into walls and installations. Neither artist finds reason to separate life from work so, as a friend of theirs, you’re never quite sure when you’re being framed.
Why bother to differentiate art vs a dinner party? (Painters from left: Mimi, Laini Nemett, Ellen Schneiderman, Geoffrey Miller)
They are also at opposite ends of their careers -- Laura looking up from her just-sprouted practice and Mimi looking down over her tall, lush one that bears strong, intricate branches and encases many concentric rings.
Mimi's.
Oh. And both Laura and Mimi have big live/work spaces (as pictured in all of these photos), which is the reason I thought to write about them together in the first place. Huge. The word “cavernous” comes to mind and can’t be shaken.
Mimi's studio space.
Mimi Gross spent a chunk of her twenties traveling around Italy in a horse-drawn carriage, supporting herself hand to mouth with puppet shows performed out of the back. She’s shot the shit with just about everyone you’ve read about in your 20th century art textbook. Her stories of travel and art world exploits are endless and spellbinding. It’s hard to fathom all that she’s seen and shaped and loved and left behind.
Early portrait of Mimi.
The one piece Mimi did about her travels in Berlin. A light box diorama. Simple and a bit slapstick -- I was immediately brought back there and felt the weight of the city in the paper construction that must have weighed next to nothing.
She has lived and worked in this giant flat in Manhattan for (I believe) over 30 years. The walls are stacked salon style to high ceilings with bright, bold art that documents and fictionalizes so many pasts it’s dizying. And the other half of the space is all new work – her studio. I think what leaves me most in awe of Mimi, and it’s quite a list to top, is the freshness of her palette. Her studio is like an enormous, overgrown garden. The new work climbing up the walls, ceiling and floor, is obviously on some sort of super fertilizer.
The bedroom portion of Laura's room.
Laura Hudson, who graduated from MICA’s MFA program with me last May, is discovering and staking out for the first time the territory that will be hers to mine and build on. Like me, she has little more than instinct and the voices in her head (painting teachers, the elder art gods, buddies, favorite musicians, Tom Bombadil (that could just be me)) to guide her to strange new lands. At this point the path seems arbitrary and disjointed, but I have a feeling that when she looks back over her travels, the path will show itself to be patterned with purpose and direction. Laura is someone who is sensitive enough to feel the pull of her “true North” and bold enough to follow it blindly.
The studio part.
She chose to stay in Baltimore after she graduated in large part because of the space she lives in, one of the rooms in the H&H Building – a vital organ of Bmore’s grassroots art and music scene, housing 3 galleries and 2 music venues (the count changes weekly). The show that is up now at Gallery Four, Laura’s floor, “Cowboys and Engines” by Dustin Carlson, stakes out the vast, industrial space brilliantly. The director of the Baltimore Museum of Art told me that she thought it was one of the strongest shows she’s seen, anywhere, in years.
Laura's door opens onto this.
Laura has a solo show coming up at the Arlington Arts Center in Virginia in the fall and, to prep, they let her throw a sleepover party in the space. She filmed it and is plotting life-sized paintings of the revelers that she will hang for the opening as a similar crowd fills the room.
And then this.
And finally this.
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