Welcome to the Studio 2014

Kent Monkman’s painting ‘Welcome to the Studio’ is a complex scene rendered in oil with a palette of warm browns, greens and muted reds. I’m just imagining Monkman there, wrestling with the canvas, as it slowly reveals its secrets through layers of trial and error. The density of the image! It must have taken a great deal of time. You can almost feel the artist’s presence, caught between representation and the act of mark-making itself. Take a look at the figures, how some are painted with great detail while others are left as ghostly suggestions of form. It’s like the artist is thinking through the painting, with the brush, exploring different styles and approaches all at once. The studio setting itself becomes a stage, a place for performance and transformation. It reminds me of other artists who use the studio as a site of inquiry, like Philip Guston, constantly questioning the nature of painting itself. Monkman makes it his own! Painting for him becomes a way of embodying histories, inviting us to question and reimagine our understanding of them.