For two fast-rising painters on the Eastside Culture Crawl, finding decent studio spaces has been crucial to their chosen careers

To an outsider, Fiona Ackerman’s studio might look considerably less exotic than, say, Andy Warhol’s Factory. Tucked up three flights of stairs in the labyrinthine Parker Street Studios, it has paint spattering the floors, cans sprouting brushes of all shapes and sizes, and multicoloured abstract canvases lining the white walls. A big open window looks out on industrial rooftops, with netting to prevent pigeons from taking roost. But this is Ackerman’s Factory, every bit as inspirational to her as the New York spot that gave birth to soup-can pop art was to Warhol—or the adobe New Mexico retreat was to Georgia O’Keeffe, or the Montmartre workspace was to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, for that matter.

“This studio is perfect for me—it’s a dream come true,” the young artist says, sitting as the grey light of a November day streams in the old, multipaned windows. “It’s having a space where you can treat your practice like a serious artistic endeavour. Having a space where you feel comfortable to do your own work—where you’re at home in your practice.”

Ackerman’s art is taking off: she had her candy-coloured, collagelike canvases featured in a solo exhibit at the Diane Farris Gallery in May, and she’s represented by galleries in Atlanta and Los Angeles. She credits her fledgling success partly to the East Side sanctuary that she moved into just over two years ago.

“If you don’t have space then you don’t have the opportunity to take risks,” says the Montreal-born artist, who paints on the floor, spattering and swirling her acrylics and oils from above. She often works on a piece over weeks or months, overpainting and reorganizing the patterns. “If the studio is too expensive, then you have to take on another job and you don’t have time. And if it’s not large enough, then you can’t store your work.” In the old space—a small studio above the Interurban Gallery—that she had after graduating from the then Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, she found she was trying to do “six paintings in one”, just because she didn’t have room to work on several pieces simultaneously.

As thousands of people descend on the 13th annual Eastside Culture Crawl this weekend (November 20 to 22), they’ll be entering the inner sanctum of the artist—the place that many, like Ackerman, have worked so hard to secure, the place where hardly anyone else steps through the doors over the course of a year. Studio space has rarely been so scarce in this city. And when an artist finally scores that spot, or decides to give up the day job and pour everything into their work, it’s a massive turning point.

“It’s amazing how my own work has progressed, from my peers looking at it and definitely from the Crawl,” says Valerie Arntzen, Crawl executive director and an assemblage artist who used to run the huge event, manage her film-industry work, and also practise her art in an office in her home. She moved into her studio at the Paneficio Studios on Keefer Street just four years ago. Talking over the phone amid last-minute Crawl preparations, she sums up the benefits of a decent studio space this way: “If you don’t have that sanctuary, you progress slower.”

Arntzen has seen members of the Crawl forced by tough times to give up their studios in the past year. But it continues to impress her how many artists can hold on to those spaces in this economy—and how many new ones are still making the leap into the studio full-time. The Crawl is showing more than 300 people in 60 studios this year; many, Arntzen observes, are surviving by splitting those spaces up into smaller bits and sharing them with others.

Still, even with studiomates, it remains an insular job. “If you go to Parker Street [Studios], it’s a perfect example: there’s not a soul in the halls but you can hear that there are artists working behind all the doors,” Arntzen explains. “It’s not like a theatre play where you work with others; with an artist, you usually have to be by yourself. We’re not hanging around in coffee shops or sitting around yakking. In these times, with all these arts cuts, it’s so hard to get people to understand it is a job.”

Several blocks away from Ackerman’s studio, in the William Clark Studios on William Street, Roselina Hung has adapted to a smaller, shared workspace.

That’s okay: her tiny studio suits her miniature oil paintings. From this little corner, where impossibly delicate brushes sit neatly stacked on a desk in front of the canvases on her wall, she is quietly reinventing portraiture in strikingly contemporary ways.

Hung admits part of the reason she started doing miniatures was that it worked well in the smaller studio spaces she had here and in Europe. But there were other, more important inspirations, too.

“Partially, I like the challenge of working so small,” says Hung, who paints on canvases hung directly on the wall. She is sitting in her studio, looking slightly surreal beside a painting of herself in a polar-bear skin. “I like just being able to work so closely to something. And you can’t help but get up really closely to see it— you have to get right up to its face to look at it.”

Hung is getting noticed as well: as a finalist for this year’s edition of the Kingston Prize, a national portraiture award, she has one of her works making the rounds of galleries back east. (Coincidentally, it joins one by Ackerman, who earned an honourable mention.) In last year’s Crawl, she caught the attention of a Pendulum Gallery coordinator, which led to her scoring a major solo show there earlier this month.

Hung found the space in the William Clark Studios two years ago, following a long search, after moving back from London. At first, she had tried to make art in her mother’s home.

“I was in my mom’s den, living there and painting. I work with oils, and with the smells and everything, I said, ”˜I can’t do this anymore,’ ” the artist says with a laugh.

In her search, Hung inquired at the massive Parker Street Studios, where she says she was told the waiting list was so long there was no point putting her name on it. When she finally scored her space on William Street, she tried to juggle her art with a part-time job. “It was so hard having to change mindsets from office work to coming in here,” she explains. “I’d have to just sit here and get into it.”

Working to create the pieces for the solo show at the Pendulum, she finally quit her day job in the summer. “My solo exhibit was a big thing, so I figured that’s harder to come by than finding another part-time job,” she says. “It was now or never.”

Painting in a studio wasn’t new for the UBC grad. She got her first taste at Paris’s Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, on an exchange in her third year of university.

“That was my first experience of going to art school and just doing art,” she says. “My studio looked over the Seine, and I just crossed a bridge and I was at the Louvre. We were just a few blocks from the Musée d’Orsay”¦.I learned so much from just seeing the works, and there’s all this portraiture there. That was the first time I started doing oils, and at that point I knew this is what I want to do. But it’s hard with portraiture because it’s not so much in fashion.”

Bringing in the richly detailed technique and symbolism of art history, and updating them with pop-culture references and nostalgic retro flourishes, Hung is doing her part to pull her chosen form back into style.

She’s created self-portraits that explore her feelings of being torn between countries: in one, she depicts herself in double, sitting in front of a scrolled wallpaper that represents Europe; between her two selves sits a Chinese-style fan-shaped window that looks out on the wrecked trees of the 2006 Vancouver windstorm.

More recently, Hung has branched out into semi-abstracted portraits of couples and families with fields of ’60s and ’70s fabric patterns where their clothing should be. In one image, a grinning family—taken from an old Sears catalogue, where its members were all dressed in matching pyjamas—conjoins under a gaudy blanket of kitschy, Brady Bunch–vintage daisy print.

It’s a strong new direction for Hung, and one she was able to test with viewers in the last Crawl.

“The reactions I got from people when they saw it was they started laughing,” she says. “But that was a good thing to me! People were giving me stories about when they went on family vacations and how their parents were dressing them up the same. I’m not sure that if they had been in a more serious space they would have. In a gallery, I can’t sit and watch people’s reaction to my work all the time.”

Arntzen says visitors are drawn to the Crawl partly because they get to talk directly to artists like Hung.

“But the flip side is what the artist gets. If you’re signed to a gallery, you’re expected to do certain kinds of work. Here, you get to create this body of work and you get hundreds of people coming in and responding to it. So they not only get the feedback, but they get to do what they want.”

These days at 1000 Parker Street, Ackerman is working on looser, washier abstracts in earthier hues, their gestural squiggles and splashes of colour all broken up into bits and then meticulously fitted together like a mismatched puzzle—“a tightly organized chaos”, as she puts it. You can see the progression during the Crawl, when she’ll show them next to the tighter paint-collages of the Farris show, and earlier figurative pieces.

“The Crawl is turning over a leaf—you clean everything up, you paint the walls, and you put your best face on—you hang your work,” she says, pointing out pieces she’ll show from the past three or four years. “It makes you realize, ”˜This is where I was and this is where I went’.”¦It’s like a mini-retrospective.”

Both Ackerman and Hung look forward to opening up their studios—their “dream come true”—to visitors for three days each year.

The hugely popular Crawl turns out to be just another big side benefit of finally taking the leap and finding a studio space.

There’s only one apparent drawback. “I’ve never been able to see the Crawl,” Hung says with a sigh. “Maybe on the last day; when it slows down I might run around here. It would be nice to talk to people about their work.”