Large Studio at Castiglion 1993

Curator: This is Stephen McKenna’s “Large Studio at Castiglion” from the Tate collection. It's an interior view, full of smaller framed pictures. What catches your eye? Editor: The light. It’s somehow both warm and detached, a clinical illumination of an intensely personal space. The easel dominates, a silent sentinel. Curator: The studio is a charged symbol, the place where the artist wrestles with ideas and forms, and here it's also the setting for what seems like his own paintings on the wall. Editor: Yes, the paintings *within* the painting are fascinating. Windows, doorways, architectural fragments... They repeat, like visual echoes, almost totemic. Curator: McKenna often played with perspective and representation. What's real, what's a reflection, what's a painting? It gets very meta, doesn't it? Editor: It does. He seems to be building a narrative of artistic creation, one brick, one canvas, at a time. The empty chair, the basket...a sense of expectant quietude. I wonder if he's about to arrive and add something else? Curator: It's an invitation, I think, to enter McKenna's world, his process. The studio as a landscape of the mind. Editor: It certainly gives you a glimpse into the artistic process, and the symbols and meanings layered in the space.