STUDIO SPECIAL
MICHAEL CRAIG MARTIN
How private are you as an artist? I’m private as an artist, not private as a person. I would like my work to be known by as many people as possible, but I am not interested in celebrity. The only things that truly interest me are to do with art. When I was young I was very shy – teaching taught me to get over it. I gradually realised that I had the ability to articulate an artist’s point of view better than many people. It’s a risky thing to do sometimes, so I try to judge carefully when to speak.
Is your studio your sanctuary? Yes. I absolutely love this studio. I come here six, seven days a week. I live most of my life here. I work, go out to eat and go home to bed. That’s all I do at home: sleep! I usually get here in the morning
between 9.30 and 10.00. I may stay until 7.30 or 8.00. I have one principal assistant who has been with me for many years, and manages most of the things I do. He is a very good artist himself – I couldn’t work with someone whose work I didn’t respect. We’ve worked together for such a long time that he can double-think me. I could die and – as long as he didn’t tell anybody – I could go on having shows of new work for years! I don’t understand how some artists have 10 assistants. I wouldn’t know what to do with 10 people! I’d be worried all the time, trying to find jobs
32 Artists & Illustrators
for them to do. I work as hard as I can because I like it. The only thing that limits what gets done here is me. This studio is essentially for making
paintings; that’s what we do here. I do most of my preliminary work for everything on a computer in the studio office. If it’s sculpture, it’s generally done elsewhere. I work with print studios, and I have someone who does all the software for my computer works. So there are people who are
doing various things for me, but they are rarely ‘in-house’.
Does an artist have to be neurotic to gain extended insight? I don’t think I’m particularly neurotic, but I can be very obsessive and controlling. The hardest thing about being an artist that no-one ever tells you is the challenge of trying to maintain creative development over a lifetime. I’ve always felt that dealers are much more neurotic as a group than artists, more egomaniacal, more narcissistic, more self-absorbed, more ridiculously eccentric. Artists seem to me to be sensible
people, essentially well-grounded. If you need a shelf put up, most artists can do it. That’s something I like about art. On the one hand, it’s very abstract and high-minded, and on the other hand it’s simple and practical and down to earth. It’s not all in the head, it’s in the hand. It deals with the limitations of the world, not in the perfection of things. That’s very attractive to me as a picture of reality.
If they were to take this studio away from you, what would you do? Several things, all of them bad! There’s a wonderful story about Picasso. Someone asked him, ‘What if they put you in prison and you couldn’t paint?’ He said, ‘I’d draw.’ They said, ‘What if you didn’t have any paper?’ He said, ‘I’d draw on the walls.’ They said, ‘And if they took away your pencil?’ He said, ‘I’d draw on the walls with spit!’
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© TRANSGLOBE PUBLISHING, PHOTOGRAPHY: ROBIN FRIEND
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