Studio Diary - March 2025
Behind the scenes of what’s been going on in the Haus of Cats (aka my art business) over the last month. It’s a chatty one so pop me on in the background and go make some art whilst you listen!
If you prefer to read, the transcript is below.
Studio Diary: March 2025
Welcome Back to the Studio
Hello, welcome back to the studio. If you're new here, hi, welcome. I'm Eli. I'm a professional artist living and working in Copenhagen in Denmark. And on this channel, I bring you behind the scenes of my life as an artist. One of the ways that I do that is with these monthly studio diaries, so I can tell you the ins and outs and ups and downs of everything that I'm up to.
This Month: Enforced Rest
This month, I haven't done quite as much work. In fact, I haven't really done any work, certainly not any artwork this month, because unfortunately I was poorly.
I had a wonderful trip to Liverpool at the beginning of the month to see my best friends, and we had the most amazing weekend. We had such a good time that neither one of us took any photos at all of the trip. We were too busy being in the moment to record it. But then I got COVID on the way home.
We seem to get COVID every single time I go away. I am boosted, I've had all my shots, but I am immunocompromised to a certain degree, so it seems to be just a part of my life these days that if I want to go abroad, I'm going to end up being sick afterwards. Which is a bit of a pain in the arse, but hey-ho.
Yes, so last month's theme was rest, and I had a wonderful trip to Liverpool, then I caught COVID and spent the rest of the month just feeling really poorly and spending most of my time lying on the couch reading or in bed watching telly and doing the absolute bare minimum to just keep everything ticking over. I had a lot of podcast interviews to record, and I was playing around on Substack, keeping things ticking over. But I'd do a podcast interview and then immediately go back to bed for the rest of the day.
So it's been a slow month, which is fine because my theme for last month was supposed to be rest. I just didn't expect it to be enforced rest. I thought I would actually have a chance to chill out of my own volition, but c'est la vie.
No Works in Progress This Month
I don't actually have any works in progress to share with you. It's a real shame. I just watched back last month's Studio Diary and what I wanted to do was to finish the two half-finished pieces from Things Men Have Said to Me Instead of Hello, and also do some painting because I was feeling the urge for painting. Yeah, that's still true.
I did manage to shuffle very slowly forward on one of the pieces for Things, but I haven't done any painting. I kept swatching a bunch of watercolours that I found in a cupboard, which just made me want to paint more - it was just enough to whet my appetite. So no works in progress to share this month, but I have been getting very inspired.
Inspiration from Libraries and Printed Matter
I've been lying on the sofa reading books. We have an amazing library in Copenhagen, which considering that we're in Denmark, has so many incredible books in English. You can order them from all over the country and it's just amazing. There's very rarely a book that I want to read that I can't get through the library. So if you don't already use your local library, maybe consider this a reminder to get out there and do it because we need libraries. They're so important.
I've been super inspired by libraries. I've been super inspired by printed material lately. I think since I've come off social media, my appreciation for tangible things has been renewed exponentially. And I love zines, I love artist zines, I love postcards, I love printed matter, I love physical printed books. Yeah, I'm really excited by tangible objects at the moment.
One of the things that I've done recently is I got down a bunch of artist zines from various different artists - I have them on the shelf - and I was having a look through and I was thinking, oh my gosh, I love the idea of making zines. I'm really into that. And I've been going through old sketchbooks, collating sketches together in ways that might make interesting zines. And that's been really fun. I'll talk more about that in a moment.
Two Incredible Books
I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong
One of the best books I've read ever - actually, I read two of the best books I've read ever this month. One of them was I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong and it's about microbes, microbiology. I'm a complete science nerd. I really love anything sciency. And I was absolutely captivated by this book and how just magnificent everything is, you know? The natural world just blows my mind.
Anyway, I wasn't expecting it to give me so many art ideas, but yeah, I have a real urge to go and paint slime molds and bacteria under a microscope. I'm really excited by just the whole thing. There's this whole microscopic landscape that is everywhere, all around us all the time and we can't see it, we can't interact with it in a conscious way but we're interacting with it constantly in an unconscious way. That just tickles me. It just tickles my brain.
So yeah, looking at the zine thing, I'm thinking there are some interesting sciency zine crossover things that maybe bring in some of my old illustration chops from back in the day. Maybe making a zine about something that I've read about will help me cement it in my own mind. I have a terrible problem with memory and recall, so I'm always looking for ways to improve my memory and maybe this is something that I can do that will also be a wonderful creative outlet.
Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker
The second book that I read, which was so powerful in a different way, was a book called Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker. She's a journalist and she basically tried to infiltrate the art world scene in New York and shared her findings. She went to work as a gallery assistant for a couple of places and she went and worked as a studio assistant for an artist and talked to collectors and curators and gallerists and artists. She painted this really interesting picture of the art world.
It made me realize that the way that I've chosen to share my work and talk about my work and the people that I want to connect with - I felt very vindicated in my choices. I have no desire to be a part of the art establishment. I just want to share my work and my ideas with other people who get it and can find comfort and joy in having a piece of that on their wall or in their collection.
But it gave me so much to think about. There's so much that she goes into about the nature of art, what actually art is. She approached it from the idea that she didn't understand what made a piece of art good and what made a piece of art bad, why some work was popular, why some artists got super trendy and everybody wanted to collect them. She just wanted to understand the ins and outs of that world. And it's absolutely fascinating.
The fact that she was talking about the nature of artwork prompted all sorts of ideas in my brain about things that I want to write about. It helped me clarify some of my thinking around what I think art is and how I approach it. I've been just scribbling notes for the past week since I read it, and I think that I'm going to be writing some interesting stuff about that in the coming months. So yeah, I'm looking forward to sharing that with you. It's all very embryonic at the moment, but there's stuff that I want to say about beauty and about art and about the impact that art has.
Brilliant book, highly recommended. Do go and get yourself a copy. Borrow it from the library if you can and let me know if you've read it, what you think. Leave me a comment, let me know.
Business Updates: New Shop Structure
Business has been ticking along very much as usual. I've been thinking about changing the way that I do my shop. That comes in two parts.
At the moment I have a print collection that I change out whenever I get around to it - usually there are some limited edition prints, some prints from my sketchbook that have been particularly popular on YouTube or on Substack or with my email subscribers, and then I have a big collection that I release quarterly, like Je Suis Wibbly-Wobbly that I did in February.
And that's great, but I want to find a more structured way of doing things. I also really want to find some more low-cost ways for people to get into art collecting. Following on from what I was saying about Bianca Bosker's book, I feel very strongly that art collecting shouldn't be elitist. Everyone should have the opportunity to collect art from the artists that they love. You might not have the space or the budget to collect a big painting, but I want to give people the opportunity to collect art in slightly different ways.
Zines
What I want to do is I would really love to create some zines and have that as something that happens on a rolling basis. It gives me the opportunity to explore work that maybe doesn't fit directly into my main body of work, but it's stuff that happens along the way - things I'm inspired by, things that capture my attention that maybe don't fit into my overarching theme of otherness and connection. But I still want to share them with you because it all feeds into the main work. I think zines might be a really nice way of doing that.
Postcard Subscriptions
The other thing I've been looking at, which I've seen a few artists do, is postcard subscriptions. I'm still costing this out and seeing what that might look like. But again, with not using social media quite so much, it's interesting to find other ways to communicate with people. I really miss handwritten letters, handwritten posts.
Also, as an art collector myself, one of the ways that I collect art is by collecting postcards. If you come to my house you'll see dozens and dozens of framed postcards around the studio and the rest of my house. I really like the idea of giving people just a little treat that they can look forward to once a month. Maybe I'll separate them out into themes or maybe it'll just be a wild card - postcard of a finished piece of work or postcard of something from my sketchbook or something that I've made specially. Yeah, I don't know. I'm still playing around with all of that.
Monthly Shop Updates
Taking that into consideration, it makes more sense to do a monthly shop update rather than a quarterly one. I've been looking into just having the shop open for one weekend a month and then closing it down again. So it makes a really nice rhythm for me in terms of workflow and means that when I do a big quarterly collection, there's a lot of work that goes up and then I have a lot of work to do after that - packing and sending and things - which takes a lot of time.
So maybe if I do it monthly then we can balance that out a little bit. I'm playing around with that at the moment. I'll keep you posted on what that looks like as we go along. I think it'll be fun. I'm just always looking for ways to make it more fun, make it more accessible, so I can make more art, really.
Podcast Interviews
The other thing that's been great business-wise, pretty much the only tangible thing I've done this month that hasn't been up in my head, has been the podcast interviews. I've done four interviews so far and oh my god, they're so good. I'm so excited about sharing them with you. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to it.
With all of this stuff, if there's anything that you're interested in finding out more about, my newsletter is the place to be. That's where I share everything first. Get yourself over to ellenortriestudio.com/keep-in-touch - link is in the description.
April Theme: Practice
Because I went away and then I was ill, I feel like I've skidded off my practice a little bit. So my theme for April is practice. That means just coming back into my routines, coming back into my practices, playing in my sketchbook, doing no pressure work in my sketchbook, getting back to working on Things Men Have Said To Me collection. Yeah, just re-establishing routines, getting back into things.
We do have the Easter holidays right in the middle of the month so that means everything's going to be a bit wonky. But I just want to keep the idea of practice in my head and keep coming back to things. The art creation goes hand in hand with content creation, so I'm finding ways to make that more rhythmic and cyclical as well, so I'm not context switching all the time. Just finding my way through, finding new rhythms, re-establishing old ones, getting back into practice with my work.
And also, I would like to get the new shop update system up and running as a goal. So who knows? I'm not very good at setting goals and sticking to them. I get a lot done, but maybe not always the things I intend to. So we'll see how it all works out.
If you like this candid look into the real life world of a chronically ill artist business lady, then do like this video, comment, subscribe, go and watch some other videos - I've got lots. Make sure you're signed up to the newsletter and I'll see you in the next video.
Thanks so much for watching!
See more of my creative process in The Laboratory
