What Happens Inside A Psychedelic Artist's Studio?

“I want to be in here all the time. I love being in here. I love making things. It’s never been a thing where I’m like, oh, got to go paint something.”

Clay, for now

“Hi, I’m Sam. This is my studio, and I’m going to show you around.” That is how Sam Wilkinson, who makes work as On The Leans, started the tour.

When I arrived he was working on some clay pieces. Sam works across a lot of mediums, and clay is the one he has landed on for the moment. He finds it really interesting. “You can have it at a certain point and then completely destroy it in a matter of seconds.”

While he works, he is already thinking ahead: about textures, and about the end product, the glaze. Some of these pieces are more abstract, and with abstract work, he says, it is mostly about the colours. “I’m trying to keep them simple, because I think it works better when they’re a bit more simple.”

Oil, pencil, acrylic

One painting he had been working on recently was, all in oil. “It’s probably my favourite painting medium.” He builds up to it in layers: pencil first, then acrylic to get the colours roughly where they need to be, then the oil.

The character in it has taken on a life of its own. “To me he’s a bit like a scarecrow now. Like a farmer scarecrow or something.”

“I want the studio to be just the place where I produce everything.”

A printer off Marketplace

He has a printer in the studio too. Sam wants the studio to be self contained, partly because getting prints made is expensive. He found this one on Facebook Marketplace for 1,000 bucks. New, he reckons, they are something like seven or eight thousand. He can print onto canvas with it, and he prints his failed ones too.

Some of the paintings around the room are a couple of years old. They sit stacked at the back, hard to even get to. He sees them as part of the same project as what he is painting now. “Maybe eventually I’ll get enough to make a show or something.”

Rubbish that didn’t work

Not everything has gone to plan. Sam showed me a few pieces made from recycled rubbish, mostly paper. They failed, he said. “It just stank, and it was everywhere.” He doesn’t pretend otherwise. “They’re cool, but they’re just not that cool.” One of them, he admitted, fully looks like a bong.

From architecture to Mr Cone Head

Sam’s characters come from an unexpected place. He started an architecture degree, and a lot of his earlier work was about architectural textures and shapes, and manipulating them. “I was just like, what can I build here?”

The first character he made is still in the studio, a little broken: his arms are broken. It is built out of ply and MDF. “Essentially it’s just a house, because I liked the houses.”

From there it became about turning everyday objects into small, cute things. He showed me the first cone head. “Mr Cone Head. He’s pretty dirty right now.” There is a prototype, the little Tokyo cone, and the next ones are lined up. He also had a set of little ceramic salt and pepper shakers, which he had made by someone else. Next, he wants to do a tea set.

“If it was up to me, I would love to just not make any money.”

Money and art

Sam is not short of ideas. “I don’t have fatigue about having ideas,” he said. What wears on him is the other side: the goals he wants to reach and the business he has to run to get there. “I have this constant battle of money and art. That’s what I have trouble with most.”

Attaching a creative way of thinking to a business, he said, is really hard. His ultimate goal is simple, and he isn’t sure it is possible. “My ultimate goal is just to have enough time to do whatever I want to do. But it’s so hard. I don’t know whether that’s a real thing.”

Nobody’s here

What keeps him coming back is the making itself. “When I’m making stuff, it’s mostly the meditative process,” he said. “Nobody’s here. Got music on. I’m doing whatever I want.”