Articles

November Issue of Louisville Magazine
Photos by John Nation | Text by Jack Welch

Studio Quality: Artists in their studios
From wall-to-wall immaculateness to variably managed clutter, here's a look at the studios of five of the city's veteran or up-and-coming artists.

If you find Bryce Hudson's Portland Studio to be a bit too antiseptic, it goes beyond the lab-coat-white walls and obsessively strait, clean lines of the minimalist painter's work. The building is a former medical center erected in 1926 and retains its tight corridors and crisply designed examining rooms.

Hudson, a 28 year old who grew up in Columbus, Ohio, and attended art school at Kent State University, says he is "one of those strange cases who balances creativity and mathematics."

His geometrically patterened paintings — which are first mapped out on a computer, then outlined, masked off and spray-painted with acrylics on canvas — often tell a kind of coded story in which colors and color-block thickness and placements symbolize racial and cultural divides between people. Hudson, who is biracial, says he's been mistaken for white, black, Latino and Asian, causing "all of my work to be based on identity."

Other non-painting avenues for his art include his "Kentucky Gentleman" photographic series — in which he changes garb and makeup to become a street punk, a forklift operator, a Hasidic Jew, a disco dancer, a Native American and several other identities — as well as digitally manipulated computer-scanned print images of obscure magazine ads.