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

It's the Atlantic, you know...

The Med is too sociable. The Caribbean is just a little bit too pleased with itself. The English Channel can be a bit sullen. And the Sargasso Sea is frankly weird. No. It has to be the Atlantic.

VALDA BAILEY

Me and my Knotty Pated Fool

I've spent far more time than is probably healthy trying to understand what a large language model actually is. Not how to use it – that part is easy enough – but what sort of thing it is. I will happily admit I wouldn't be without it. In recent months, it has helped me decipher lengthy legal documents, understand Portuguese tax laws, negotiate my way through a largely incomprehensible tax portal, push back in reasonably fluent Portuguese on a pitifully inadequate insurance offer, and handle do

VALDA BAILEY

Drawing in the Dark

In 1954 Cy Twombly spent his weekends in a dark hotel room, degrading a line he had spent years learning to make. Shiraga threw the brushes away because his hands were too trained. A question for photographers whose camera movement has gone smooth: rut, or signature?

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

Flying White

Chinese calligraphy has a delightful name for the happy accident. When the brush moves fast, the ink breaks and white paper flashes through the stroke. Calligraphers call it feibai, flying white, and they have prized it for two thousand years.

VALDA BAILEY

The Art of Failing to Copy

Say the word copying to a room full of photographers and watch everyone suddenly become very interested in their shoes. On the deliberate kind of copying, the kind that takes time.

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.