Artists and their Studios- in The Times Magazine today

An artist's studio is their only properly private space, keeping the depths of themselves a mystery to the outside work, until a work comes into the limelight and enters the public's domain. They can be fascinating spaces, accounting for years of unchecked creativity, and almost a work of art in their own right as they reveal so much about their owner. A new book, Sanctuary: Britain's Artists and Their Studios is to be released on the 12th March by Thames & Hudson, showing 120 of the country's artists in their workplaces. From Tracey Emin, to Grayson Perry and Lucian Freud, these photographs bring to light previously hidden and untouched interiors. 

A quote taken from Cecile Debray's, Lucian Freud: the studio, published on the occasion of the exhibition: ‘Lucian Freud: l’atelier’; “Freud works the walls in a double sense: over the thirty years or so of occupying his top flat studio at 36 Holland Park (1977-2009), he deposited dabs and smears of excess paint on available walls, gradually creating deeply textured surfaces of accumulated, hardened paste; during the same period, these paint walls returned to Freud’s canvases in the form of renderings of themselves- paint representing paint, often surrounded by similar paint that represents flesh”.

Scans my own, originally in The Times Magazine on 25.02.12