GREEN ROOM: S M I L E R S
oranges and lemons
may 29—?, 2025
Home studio, studio home.
Duck rabbit, rabbit duck.
Wet concrete, tough spot.
Low bar, high times.
One loses a home and lives in another’s studio,
One draws the other sculpts, both think.
Home studio, studio home.
Suede head felt home.
Steal dad, shaved legs.
Low bar, high times.
One thinks about line, the other about form,
One draws the other sculpts, both think.
Home studio, studio home.
Birmingham, London,
New York, old feelings,
Low bar, high times.
One brings another’s studio home,
One draws the other sculpts, both think.
Home studio, studio home.
Death lurks, life’s murk.
Oranges and lemons.
Low bar, high times.
One moves on, now both are gone.
One draws the other sculpts, both think.
And here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head!
studio home
At UK art-school in the eighties tutors would always suggest "scaling up," moving out of one’s comfort zone, from A4 to wall-scale: the challenge of painting and drawing were many. (Size queen was on the list.) I knew it then but it’s internally fixed for me now, I like my studio kitchen-table sized and preferably “on the run”! Keep it close, minimize the pick-up and jump energies required: a box of colored pencils, a laptop, a voice. This might be a hangover from an earlier age, the Eighties, post-industrial Britain, as a post-punk kid we wore thrift army-boots we could run in, kick back when required and clear fences in a single bound. Our look both pissed off the straights, while keeping us ahead of the squares out for freak blood. These normies weren’t the finance bros, Lululemon ladies, and moneyed hipsters that currently occupy the East Village—they were the sons and daughters of former steelworkers, they believed in physical rather than financial violence. The results, however, were and are the same, both force one out of studio and home. In three decades as a curator, writer and, maker, I’ve experienced all forms of the "studio," from factory to artisanal, from the Jeff to the Mike of it. The factory model never worked for me, the studio at best is a home on the run in avoidance of cultural and financial thuggery.
Mark Beasley, NYC, 2025
home studio
Art is what the history of art is the history of.
Born in a room. Subject. Womb.
Out of a cabinet. Drawer. Floor.
Birth of installation. Barn. Door.
It lives in rooms. And so do we.
Unless - in either case - we don’t.
Make an exhibition of things in a room.
People visit things in rooms.
Visiting rooms.
Find an OCCUPATION.
Invited AND repelled, pulled AND pushed.
The fictional space: the sole trader.
The artist forced to abandon their studio home.
In this, a game for more than one player.
Say what you like about Kurt Schwitters. You really can, the man himself was wise enough to only spout nonsense. The émigré artist, serving to remind that home is where the art is. Fabricated interiors where figure and ground - in their guises as column and wall - organically mirror one another, each growing out to meet the other. Until there is no room left for anyone else.
Or take Tia Ciatta’s house, demonstrating that art is where the home is. No matter the host runs to her own opaque magical schedule…who doesn’t enjoy a bit of underlying festive with their food and wine, makes for a party! In this case a Tia Ciatta party, where many rooms are made available for guests, but where some remain private.
We might not learn much from Henry Moore’s hybrid living quarters. But Barbara Hepworth did a good job of delivering the no smoking in the day bed message.
Keith Wilson, NYC, 2025
The Green Room is temporarily home and studio to the drawings of Mark Beasley and the sculptures of Keith Wilson.