Studios: Zander Blom | Cape Town

Zander Blom writes:

'At the moment I’m working mostly on loose fragments of canvas. I think of what I do now as painting installations or gangs of pictures, or a mob of images. These fragments get taped or nailed to the studio walls. Once the walls fill up, I document the room, take the fragments down and pack them away into a box. Then the box goes back under the couch. My life for the last year has mostly been this cycle on repeat. Today the walls are almost empty, except for a couple of resolved pieces that have been put up. This new room is still in the very early stages of the cycle. There are a lot of unresolved fragments of canvas all around, strewn on the floor, hanging on drying racks, and in piles on tables and on top of boxes. Some pictures come to life in a matter of minutes. Others spend months going from table, to floor, to drying rack, to pile, back to table - collecting layers of marks along the way, before maturing into something worth nailing to the wall. When we make an installation in the gallery, we often use the studio photographs as reference to see what worked well together, but we’re not always faithful to the original arrangements.

Some days I have a plan, I have reference images and very simple sketches, and I work from them in a focused deliberate way. Other days I have no patience for this kind of thing, and then the best I can do is push pigment around hoping something interesting will eventually happen, accumulate or emerge. So short intense bursts of focus are balanced out by hours of casual labouring. It’s a kind of Yin Yang process that helps maintain sanity in the studio.'