Body, mind and soul

For most people, art is seen as a genteel pursuit requiring nothing more arduous than holding a brush of paint before a canvas tilted on an easel to facilitate the act of painting

Through fortuitous happenstance, I’ve spent the last few days visiting artist friends in their studios, which is always a greatly satisfying experience. Some painters are reserved about sharing their studio spaces with even close friends — it is where they get down and dirty and bare their souls, after all — while others actually prefer to set up meetings in the comfortable surround of paint, turpentine and chaos. Of course, increasingly, studios, especially for contemporary artists, are also about masses of metals and engineering machinery, films, screens and other thingamajigs, as they hope to finish massive installations that seem to