Where did you grow up? My family moved a lot when I was young - to various places in New England, also to Illinois and to Florida, though not in that order... Before coming to California, the longest I had lived in one spot was for five years in the middle of the Moose Hill Wildlife Sanctuary in Sharon, MA. Our only neighbor on our side of the street was the sanctuary museum about half a mile away -- the rest was all dense forest. The sanctuary had miles of hiking trails and an amazing collection of taxidermied birds - old moth-eaten eagles and hawks, herons, loons, you name it... They even had extinct Carolina parakeets and a passenger pigeon preserved under glass. I spent hours and hours drawing those birds. What brought you to art? I drew obsessively from age two onwards. I don’t know why. I remember begging my teachers in elementary school to allow me to stay indoors during recess and draw. When I was a teenager this obsession relaxed a little, and I thought I would become a scientist. But a visit to the LA County Museum inspired me to take one drawing class during my last year in college, and that was it... I fell off the wagon, so to speak, and I’ve been making art nonstop ever since. How often do you work in your studio? I work every day (or night), unless I’m traveling or doing something ambitious with the family. The hours from 9 pm to 3 am are particularly productive. Do you approach each painting the same way in a systemized manner, or does it vary? Can you tell us about the way you begin working on one of your pieces? Take us through your process. At this point, I have kind of a production pipeline, with works in various stages of completion. One part of the process has become almost purely photographic, since I began working with living insects, which rarely hold still long enough to pose for a complete painting session. Aside from this practical issue, I’m also very much interested in photographic effects, even as they are rendered and distorted through the fabulously laborious process of painting. The photo sessions require setting up a stage - often just a table covered with paper and the relevant props. In some cases I’ll create a more elaborate environment -- a fake wall with a fake electrical outlet, to cite a recent example. If my subjects are overexcited, a few minutes in the fridge is usually enough to calm them down, with no long-term harmful effects. All my living models are released unharmed afterwards. The perilous scenarios in which they are depicted are usually assembled from multiple images to prevent fatal accidents. In the past, I manually combined photos into collage studies, but now I do this almost entirely on the computer. If a study is to my liking, then I print it and do a carbon-transfer to a sheet of stretched watercolor paper. After doing final adjustments in pencil, I pick up a paintbrush and begin laying in washes of color. This is the most exciting part, when what I’m doing seems most ludicrous and improbable. I remind myself that I am a painter, not of bugs and birds, but of photographic fictions. And painting is the required final step, to bump up the unreality to a level where the whole contrivance is bearable. What materials and tools do you use most? I’m currently working entirely with watercolor. I use full sheets of Arches 140 lb. hot-press paper, which I saturate with cold water in the shower and then stretch on a large piece of thick plywood with kraft tape. I use budget brushes - squirrel quills mostly, and nylon bristle brushes for lifting off color. I have two small sable brushes for dry-brushing fine details. My palette is minimal, just a handful of staining colors: Phthalo blue, Phthalo green, Windsor yellow, and Quinacridone magenta. To these I add Payne’s gray and Lunar black to enrich the dark passages. That’s pretty much it. Occasionally I'll add a sedimentary color for texture. I mix on a small enamel butcher tray, or sometimes in recycled yogurt containers. When the brushwork is completed, I usually airbrush a dark mist of watercolor around the edges and corners to produce a smooth vignette effect. Where do you get your inspiration? I use my brain for this, but probably not the way you think. I try to spend time drawing every day with a fountain pen in a hardbound sketchbook. It may sound random, but these particular materials are important to the success of this method... Working directly with ink prevents erasures and the hardbound book prevents editing (or at least it exposes it). So this combination relieves the pressure, in a perverse way, of making a nice-looking drawing and allows instead a more raw, uncritical mode of private expression. Sometimes a drawing will consist mostly of writing. More often it resembles a kind of existential comic strip. I have stacks of these sketchbooks lying around, and when I look through them I often find the seeds of ideas that later work their way into my paintings. In the past I have tried to evolve a single promising sketchbook drawing into a painting, but this direct translation has rarely been successful. Instead, it is the process and ritual of teasing out ideas on paper that seems to lay the groundwork for future inspiration. What are you working on lately? I just started painting a small white butterfly sitting in the open jaws of a pair of pliers. Is it a gripping image? I can't say, just now. Who has visited you in the studio? I get most of my studio visits from other artists. My most recent visit was a surprise attack by two longtime friends and collectors of my earlier work. A few days previous, I had a lovely visit from local artists Lynn Hanson and John Robertson. I showed them my most recent work, and we traded caterpillars and digital printing tips. And just the previous week, I had a friendly, low-key visit with Ashley Emenegger of McLean Fine Art. But this is an unusual flurry -- normally I go weeks or months between studio visits. My very first formal studio visit ever was from Joni Gordon of Newspace back in 1995. I didn’t have a coherent body of work at that time. I was exploring too many ideas at once, and so my work had multiple personality disorder. But she was quite gracious and supportive and even showed one of my early paintings at an art fair. Because my space is so small, most of the finished work is in the house, which is also quite small. Lately I’ve been trying to keep new work unframed as long as possible, so it can be more easily viewed in one place. It's helpful to keep things focused. What is the best thing about your work space? My studio is basically a 1920s-era car shed in the back yard. It's small, so I rarely lose anything. I find working at home to be extremely convenient. I can take advantage of shorter, discontinuous blocks of time that would not be available if I had to drive somewhere to work. What don't you like about your studio (if anything)? It’s too small to hang much work on the walls, and it’s not insulated, so it’s really cold in the winter. I know this is California, but there were a few weeks in January this year when the mercury was down in the 30 - 40 degree range every night. It was like working in a refrigerator. I had an electric space heater, but it died in a shower of sparks when I tripped over it one night. What would be the ideal studio situation for you? (Location, light, size, etc?) Having at least four times more space in the same location would be nice. What (if anything) do you listen to while you work in your studio? I listen to classical music - mostly Romantic to modern piano music. Also I plow through a lot of audio books, which I recently discovered are downloadable for free from netlibrary.com if you have a Santa Monica library card. The LA Public Library is a great resource also - you can reserve any book in the system and have it delivered to your local branch. I just finished the audio edition of "Grendel" by John Gardner -- basically Beowulf retold by the monster. Before that, it was "Treasure Island." (And whenever I look at the painting I worked on that week, I find myself thinking "Arrrr!") What do you want to know about the next studio artist on SpyMart? Do you find enough time to make new work, plan future work, go to openings, promote yourself, earn a living, spend time with loved ones and otherwise have a life? (Or is the sleepless, chainsaw-juggling high-wire act just an unavoidable aspect of the artist experience?) Visit Paul Pitsker on the web: www.paulpitsker.com.