The Studio I Kept Walking Past
On meeting a fellow Berkshire painter who took the leap ten years before I did, and the conversation I did not know I needed.
For weeks I had walked past the door without going in. The residency space — a working artist's studio open to the public in that small window between bodies of work — had appeared in my line of sight maybe a dozen times. I had told myself, each time, that I would pop in "next time, when I have more time." This is something I now recognise as a small lie we tell ourselves when something feels slightly out of reach.
One Tuesday I went in.
The artist working there was Martyna — a fellow Berkshire-based painter, ten years deeper into the practice than I am, and the kind of generous-with-her-time that you only get when someone has properly settled into who they are. We talked, at first politely, then for an hour and a half.
Martyna's story is the one I think a lot of late-starting artists need to hear. Ten years ago she was working in law and wealth management, painting in the margins, telling herself the same things many of us tell ourselves about real careers and reasonable adult choices. Then she made a decision that most people consider and very few actually carry through. She left. She has been a full-time contemporary artist since.
The work in the residency space had the quietness of an artist who has spent a long time finding her own register. Skyscapes that flirt with fragility and strength — the kind that make you stand back further than you usually would. Sailboats drifting in solitude, more atmosphere than vessel. City-tinged abstracts on paper, looser and more confident than the larger pieces. Dahlia-inspired blossoms in pigment so deliberate it took me a moment to understand they were not photographs of petals but something built, mark by mark, in their direction.
My own work draws on the rhythms of the natural world, so I recognised something in what Martyna was making before we had spoken about it. There is a particular kind of relief in walking into another artist's studio and finding, on the walls, a sensibility you have been quietly building toward in your own work.
What surprised me about the conversation was how practical it became. I had expected we might talk about painting, about meaning, about the slow business of making — and we did, but Martyna spent most of the hour and a half answering the smaller, harder questions I had not quite realised I was carrying around. How she thinks about framing decisions, and which framers she trusts. What she has learned about gallery representation, and what she has gently unlearned. How she manages custom commission briefs without letting a client's certainty steamroll her own sense of the piece. Her answer to that last one made me laugh, and I am still adjusting my own commission process to match it.
There is a specific kind of generosity in an artist who has walked the path ten years ahead of you and is willing to turn around and point out the loose stones. It is not mentorship in the formal sense. It is something simpler — the willingness to share what you have already paid to learn. I left the residency space with practical answers to four or five questions I had been quietly carrying for months, a list of things to try, and the slightly unsettled feeling of having met someone who looked a great deal like a future version of myself.
Martyna's Residency Collection Launch opened in February at the Artist Studio at Bankside Hotel. I went, and stood in front of the skyscapes for longer than was probably polite.
If you are an artist working alone — or simply someone working in your own corner toward something quiet and serious — find the people ten years ahead of you on your particular path. Walk into their open studios. Stay longer than you think you should. Ask the small, embarrassed questions. Most of them will answer.
Where was the last conversation that changed how you do your work? I would love to hear.
