HOW ARTISTS WORK

How writers, artists, and other interesting people organize their days...

Gerhard Richter

He sticks to a strict routine, waking at 6:15 every morning. He makes breakfast for his family, takes Ella to school at 7:20 and is in the studio by 8. At 1 o'clock, he crosses the garden from the studio back to the house. The grass in the garden is uncut. Richter proudly points this out, to show that even it is a matter of his choosing, not by chance. At 1 o'clock, he eats lunch in the dining room, alone. A housekeeper lays out the same meal for him each day: yogurt, tomatoes, bread, olive oil and chamomile tea.

After lunch, Richter returns to his studio to work into the evening. ''I have always been structured,'' he explains. ''What has changed is the proportions. Now it is eight hours of paperwork and one of painting.'' He claims to waste time -- on the house, the garden -- although this is hard to believe. ''I go to the studio every day, but I don't paint every day. I love playing with my architectural models. I love making plans. I could spend my life arranging things. Weeks go by, and I don't paint until finally I can't stand it any longer. I get fed up. I almost don't want to talk about it, because I don't want to become self-conscious about it, but perhaps I create these little crises as a kind of a secret strategy to push myself. It is a danger to wait around for an idea to occur to you. You have to find the idea.'' As he talks, I notice a single drop of paint on the floor beneath one of his abstract pictures, the only thing out of place in the studio.

The New York Times Magazine, January 27, 2002

Chris Ofili

He arrives in his studio at 9 or 10 in the morning, he explained. He sets aside a corner for watercolors and drawings "away from center stage," meaning where he paints his big, collaged oil paintings. "I consider that corner of the studio to be my comfort zone," he said. First, he tears a large sheet of paper, always the same size, into eight pieces, all about 6 by 9 inches. Then he loosens up with some pencil marks, "nothing statements, which have no function."

"They're not a guide," he went on, they're just a way to say something and nothing with a physical mark that is nothing except a start."

Watercolor goes on top. He estimated that each head takes 5 to 15 minutes. Occasionally he'll paint while on the phone. He may finish one watercolor or 10 in the course of a day.

"There have been days I have not made them," he added. "Sometimes it felt absolutely necessary to do pencil drawings instead. It was cleansing. There's a beautiful sound that pencil makes when it's scratching on paper. Very soothing. Watercolor is like waving a conductor's baton. It's very quick. I almost don't even have to think."

"Sometimes," he added, "I will return to the watercolors in the evening. And that's a completely different atmosphere. If things haven't gone well during the day, I can calm down. The big paintings are like a performance -- me looking at me. It's self-conscious. There's a lot of getting up close to the canvas, then stepping back, reflecting on decisions, thinking about gestures. I try to take on all sorts of issues and ideas. So my mind is busy. With watercolor, it's just about the colors and the faces. They're free to go any way they want to go. I may tell myself, 'This will be the last one I do.' Then I'll do another. That's liberating."

The New York Times, May 8, 2005

Willem de Kooning

If Elaine [Fried, whom de Kooning married in 1943] found it strange to return directly to work on her wedding day, she never said so. That was the way of life on Twenty-second Street: every woman in de Kooning's life from Nini onward could attest that he was already married to his work. During the time when Elaine was commuting back and forth to Brooklyn, de Kooning's days were devoted to art, and they continued to be so after she moved in permanently. Typically, the couple rose late in the morning. Breakfast consisted mostly of very strong coffee, cut with the milk they kept in winter on a window ledge; they did not have a refrigerator, an appliance that in the early forties was still a luxury. (So was a private phone, which de Kooning would not have until the early sixties.) Then the day's routine began with de Kooning moving to his end of the studio and Elaine to hers. Work was punctuated by more cups of strong coffee, which de Kooning made by boiling the coffee as he had learned to do in Holland, and by many cigarettes. The two stayed at their easels until fairly late, taking a break only to go out for something to eat or to walk up to Times Square to see a movie. Often, however, de Kooning, who hated to stop working, began again after supper and pushed far into the night, leaving Elaine to go to a party or concert. "I remember very often walking by and seeing the lights on and going up," said Marjorie Luyckx. "In those studios, the heat used to go off after five o'clock because they were commercial buildings. Bill would be painting with his hat and coat on. Painting away, and whistling."
Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, de Kooning: An American Master

Jasper Johns

The self-imposed solitude at the core of Johns's life is more apparent in St. Martin. James Meyer, his studio assistant in Connecticut, comes down at the start of Johns's stay each year, which usually lasts from just before Christmas to March; he helps Johns set up the studio, stretch canvases, and so forth, but then he leaves, and Johns is alone in the house. Friends come for brief visits--he has a guest house--but you sense that he is perfectly comfortable with no one around. Although he keeps to no regular schedule, he gets up early and usually works for several hours every day. For recreation, he swims in his pool, or he gardens. The round, slatted-wood table in the living room is piled with books that people have sent him: "Kafka on the Shore," by Haruki Murakami; "The Liberal Imagination," by Lionel Trilling; "The Complete Poems of Ted Berrigan"; "Cézanne and the Eternal Feminine," by Wayne Anderson. He often wakes during the night and reads.
The New Yorker, December 11, 2006

Ben Katchor

9:20 a.m. Awoke in an air-conditioned bedroom; forgot it was July.

1:15 p.m. Under the agonizing pressure of a deadline, I finish this week's strip. As a reward, I take a delightful subway ride to the offices of the Forward to deliver the job in person. For several hours, I am in a state of euphoria which accompanies the completion of my strip each week. Walking along 33rd Street from 7th Avenue to Broadway, I stop to look at the vacant lot that was, until recently, the mysterious 34th Street Arcade.

2:30 p.m. Continue by subway downtown to resume packing the books in my soon-to-be-relinquished "old" studio. Books I haven't seen for ten years: The Mountaineers, a play in three acts by George Colman, the younger, London 1803; a bound volume of The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, London, 1832; East of Fifth, the Story of an Apartment House, by Alan Dunn, New York, 1948.

5:15 p.m. Outside of a health-food store on Broadway, a familiar scene. A black man rummages through the day's garbage neatly packed in plastic bags at the curbside. The Mexican employee, who just set the garbage out, opens the door and tells him to stop. The black man is angered and says, "This is garbage." (Implying that it now belongs to no one.) "Come out and fight me for it!" The health-food store employee curses and goes back into the store. We have here, in microcosm, the cause of all human conflict.

8:45 p.m. Ran across the street to the "Associated" for cottage cheese. Waiting on line at the check-out counter, I have two profound revelations:

1) The price of all purchases in all stores should be rounded off to the nearest dollar amount. By this general agreement, we would recoup the time wasted making change and be spared the destructive force of loose coins on the fabric of our pockets.

2) An arrangement should be made so that the buying of groceries can be done in private. No one's purchases should be subject to the humiliating scrutiny of the person who happens to be next on line. The situation, as it now exists, will someday in the future be looked back upon as an inhumane condition of 20th-century life.

10:00 p.m. Tonight, while waiting outside of a video rental store on 105th Street, I saw two diminutive, middle-aged Puerto Rican men who seemed to have been cast by circumstance into a state of perpetual childhood. One carried a piece of a fishing rod, the other, a small portable radio; both wore short pants. They were walking east, enraptured by the evening, distracted by everything they saw, probably drunk. Were their parents still alive, or were they wards of the State?

2:10 a.m. At this hour, people are inspired by the relative quiet of Broadway to begin screaming. They scream in anger at a companion, or to the public in general.

Slate, July 8, 1997

Gary Panter

Get up at 7:30 in the morning -- feed cats, drive daughter to school, read the NY Times and drink chocolate milk. Do chores and tasks and try to get time to make art. Make art. Take naps. Before each 5 minute nap I read a page or two. Right now I'm reading Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day. Make art. Go to sleep at 3:00 in the morning.
Readersvoice.com, March 2007

William Wegman

Morning routine: In Maine, I get up around 7:30 or so. First you have to feed four dogs four different things. They all have their diets, their own pills that they're taking. Batty's on all kinds of medication, Rimadyl for arthritis and Pepcid AC and Benadryl.
Workout: Every morning the dogs and I take a bike ride, about five miles uphill. In the afternoon I usually take them on a 20-mile ride. That's why I'm so fit [Laughs].
The New York Times Magazine, September 14, 2003

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