HYPERALLERGIC

A View From the Easel During Times of Quarantine

July 3, 2020

This is the 167th installment of a series in which artists send in a photo and a description of their workspace. In light of COVID-19, we’ve asked participants to reflect on how the pandemic has changed their studio space and/or if they are focusing on particular projects while quarantining. 

Barbara Friedman, Manhattan, New York

My studio is in our Financial District apartment in downtown Manhattan. The building is 300 yards from the World Trade Center, and given that we moved in a year before 9/11, I have always found the location uncanny. The studio’s windows take in the Federal Reserve, Morgan Chase, and, down the street, the Stock Exchange. What’s an art studio doing here? It’s that much weirder these days when our apartment has become the limits of our world. But I’m grateful for this place to work, and my studio has made itself the center of the home. My husband and I use it as a makeshift gym every morning; in other ways, too, it’s a harbor that overflows. This photograph captures its surreality — men working outside windows (Federal Reserve beyond them); paintings; laptop; books; camera; tripod; severed doll’s head — corralled chaos that finds its way into the work I’ve been doing. During the pandemic I have continued a series of dystopian oil paintings, but also recently started making amorphous watercolors. Both bodies of work are about spillage in every sense of that word, appropriately for the studio that my life has spilled into and will be flowing through for who knows how long.