Studio Atlantic

TO WANDER & WONDER

Unhurried thoughts that circle, and sit. Sometimes they come back to land. More often they stay out at sea. Seagulls and salt air. Storm fronts, and slow tides. The shifting edge between land and water.

VALDA BAILEY

The Indecisive Moment

Never finished. Only trusted. Here's a story about Pierre Bonnard – it may be apocryphal but I like to think not. He is supposed to have slipped a small box of paints into the Louvre, persuaded a friend to distract the guard, and disappeared off to retouch one of his own paintings while it hung on the wall – finished, framed, hung. Job done. Except Bonnard thought otherwise. I mentally refer back to this story more often than I should. I have already detailed the ridiculous amount of time I

Duane Michals

VALDA BAILEY

Beyond the Shutter

The single frame was never the point. New York, 2011. A restaurant a stone's throw from the Bowery. A hungry group of mature students gather after a gruelling day trying to unite light, colour and gesture into something that might earn an approving grunt from Jay Maisel. Ten of us round a table, mostly professional photographers. I had advanced since my first workshop with Jay, but I felt every inch a pretender. Still in thrall to Flickr, where everything is a 'great capture!!!' and the 'likes'

VALDA BAILEY

Someone was Here

For years the advice was the same, and I took it. A photographer's website should be a white room. Black or grey text, kept small. Nothing to distract from the pictures, no clutter, no personality. Let the work speak for itself. So I built mine that way. valdabailey.com is a clean grid of images on a pale neutral ground, just like all other artists' sites are clean grids of images on pale neutral grounds. It ticked all the boxes – albeit with a few defiant black rectangles dotted around. The epi

STUDIO WORK

Making. Materials. Methods. And how one decision in the studio informs the next.

VALDA BAILEY

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(or is it?) Graphic design. Fonts. Colour. Margins. As a young teenager they held a strange fascination for me. On reflection, graphic design is a job that would have suited me well. However, as is so often the case, life took me down a different road and any fond ambitions I had of kerning words at midnight, moving logos three mm to the right then back again, or deciding which curly apostrophe was the right one for a Sunday remained a distant dream. The fork in my career path did not stop me

VALDA BAILEY

What the Hands Know

My studio is in boxes. On cold wax, kozo paper, the surface that pushes back, and the way the hand understands what the eye has yet to realise.

THE IMAGE ROOM

Images. Residues of light and time along the Silver Coast. The ideas that hung around long enough to take form.

VALDA BAILEY

The Silence Before the Song

What to do with loss? On moving to Portugal, the allure of fado and the line between drawing on a culture and decorating with it.

VALDA BAILEY

50 Shades

Fifty grey fragments lifted from the Silver Coast – sea, sand, cloud, foam, the occasional sulky bit of almost-blue

VALDA BAILEY

Estrago

A treehouse that kept its roof, a house that didn't, and a box of spoiled paper that is evolving daily. Estrago, at Studio Atlantic.