Artist Maria Calandra has been living in Brooklyn since 2006 after getting her BFA at Ohio University, her MFA at Cornell University, and brief stints in London and Pittsburgh.  Maria is onto something unique with her blog Pencil in the Studio, which she launched in April 2011. It started out as a simple idea consisting of studio visits where she chats with artists. However, what makes it special is that she spends nearly the entire day with them and always brings along paper and pencils.

As she gets to know the artist and their process, Maria makes and finishes two drawings of her surroundings. Regarding the experience thus far, she said “I feel that I have made some real life long connections. We have gotten down to the real nitty- gritty in some cases, which has been very cool.”

The results are superb and the project keeps gaining momentum.  Maria has a show in the works for this coming spring or summer of her P.I.T.S drawing series with Daily Operation, which she described, “It will be quite satisfying to see all of them (with their particular spaces and strange juxtaposition of art and studio) shown together.”

To Maria, a painter,  the drawings are also a way for her to get back to her love of the drawn or painted ” line” and she knows that the series of drawings is influencing her concept of space and line in her current and upcoming painting projects. “If only I could take the time to look at all work the way I do in this instance, it has truly changed the way I see things.”

She says that, “Since starting, I have found that it has slowly evolved into not only a drawing project, but also a critical look at my contemporaries, a collection of artists and their practice, and an unusual kind of study of  the various processes within art making. It has been a real learning experience.”

When asked who her dream studio visits (dead or alive) would be she told me, “I won’t say those that are living so as not to jinx it — I have high hopes! Otherwise, I would love to visit with some tried and true faves: Miro, Rothko ( how crazy would it be to try and draw that kind of subtle intensity?) , Giotto, Wols, Beuys.”

Please visit her blog here:

PENCIL IN THE STUDIO

Images from top to bottom(please click to see the full visit):

1-2 Tamara Gonzales

3-4 Christine Heindl

5-6  EJ Hauser

If you are in NYC definitely check out this exhibition The Loving Story: Photographs by Grey Villet that is coming up at ICP from January 20- May 6, 2012 …

From ICP:

Forty-five years ago, sixteen states still prohibited interracial marriage. Then, in 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court considered the case of Richard Perry Loving, a white man, and his wife, Mildred Loving, a woman of African American and Native American descent, who had been arrested for miscegenation nine years earlier in Virginia. The Lovings were not active in the Civil Rights movement but their tenacious legal battle to justify their marriage changed history when the Supreme Court unanimously declared Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law—and all race-based marriage bans—unconstitutional. Photographer Grey Villet, on assignment for LIFE magazine, traveled to Virginia in 1965 to document the Lovings’ story. His intimate photographs do not focus on the couple’s epic legal battle but instead show the everyday pleasures of two shy and nonpolitical people, their quiet dedication to each other and to their family. The exhibition, organized by Assistant Curator of Collections Erin Barnett, includes some twenty vintage prints loaned by the estate of Grey Villet and by the Loving family, and complements the debut of the HBO Documentary Film The Loving Story on February 14, 2012.

for more info:

http://www.icp.org/museum/exhibitions/upcoming

*photo of Richard & Mildred Loving by Grey Villet