Jon Frankel

Artist's studios are one of my favorite places to be. I expect to see old cigar boxes bulging with oil crayons, tins of pastels, paintings and canvases stacked against the walls, an ashtray full of cigarette butts or an old pipe on its side, the butt ends of cigars, and squashed tubes of oil paints, acrylics, drawing pads and charcoal pads and tracing paper stacked up, shelves of battered poetry books and books about birds and the masks of Oceania, perhaps Wallace's Malaysia journals...and objects of various sorts, rags, the smell of turpentine and linseed oil, failures and transcendent visions crammed carelessly together and at the center, rummaging about, someone in jeans and T shirt, and of course a radio or portable cd player, splattered with paint. There should be dust in the corners devoted to abandoned things.
-Jon Frankel