Before we get into it, I want you to sit with a few questions:
Why this subject?
Why this material?
Why now?
Not the polished version you’d put in an artist statement, but your initial gut response.
If you can get past “I’ve always been drawn to it” and find something more specific, more alive, more curious to say, you probably already have a research practice. You may just have never called it that.
Let’s name it and embrace it. This episode of The Art Biz is about going deeper by leading with curiosity.
I’m not talking about reference images. I’m not talking about scrolling through other artists’ work for inspiration. That’s surface-level inspiration at best.
Research, as I’m defining it, is any sustained act of curiosity about your subject: what it is, where it comes from, what it means, how it behaves, who has cared about it before you and why.
It can look like visiting a place, reading about a historical period, interviewing someone, observing something over time, or working with a material you don’t yet fully understand.
For artists, inquiry and making are distinct activities but inseparable. Each feeds the other.
The question to keep returning to: What don’t I know about this that I should?
Listen
How I lead with curiosity
Quick example of how this has shown up for me.
I’ve been drawn to timelines ever since my days as an art history student. They helped me memorize dates and visualize progression. I used them again when planning shows at the art museum, and I teach their usage in my planning workshop.
I wondered how they might show up in my own art so I began investigating them. I started with web searches and found all kinds of crazy timelines, eventually coming across a definitive book: Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline by Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton.
I have no idea where it’s going. That’s the point. I’m allowing myself to be curious about this interest.
What it does to the work
I want to be very clear about something: you are not researching to find the right answer.
This is a real problem in our lives and how we move through the world right now. We’ve been trained to google the answer, to resolve the question as quickly as possible rather than sit in the unknown. But that’s not what this is.
Research for artists is about being open to more questions. It’s a process of self-discovery — of finding out what you notice, what you think, what only you see because you’re paying attention.
That means no AI, no Google searches looking for conclusions. Use those tools to find a book, to locate an archive, to find where records are held so you can go visit. But the inquiry itself has to be yours.
A word about how to research
Research produces specificity, and specificity is what allows a viewer to connect with work rather than scroll or stroll past it.
The difference between a painting of a barn and a painting of this barn is something we can feel even if we don’t know the backstory: this geography, this history, this light at this time of year. The layers of meaning don’t have to be visible to be present. We feel the weight of them, the sophistication behind them.
Work that comes from genuine inquiry isn’t fully resolved on the surface. It holds something back. It pulls you deeper as the artist, and it pulls the viewer in.
Decorative work is beautiful, and there’s nothing wrong with it, but you see it, register it, and move on. Work that came from real investigation takes us on a ride.
How it shows up in your career
Beyond the studio, a research practice changes things in concrete ways.
- It creates a body of work with a through-line. You aren’t making a bunch of random, unrelated pieces (however strong individually) but work that’s going somewhere.
- It transforms your artist statement, which is important because this is the basis for how you define your work to your audience. There’s a significant difference between a statement that summarizes your subject and one that articulates your relationship to it. Research makes the second possible. The personal is universal. Specificity pulls people in.
- It makes your conversations with collectors and gallerists more substantive. When you can talk about your work with genuine curiosity and depth, you become someone worth knowing, worth showing, worth collecting. People want to be around that. They want to be in dialogue with you.
- It builds confidence, which is a key asset for an art business since there’s no shortage of things and people that will try to erode it. When you know where the work is grounded, that confidence is earned.
The career-level effect: depth of practice becomes depth of reputation over time.
Depth of practice
becomes depth of reputation
Making curiosity a practice
Research isn’t a phase you move through before a project begins. It’s ongoing. Something you’re always feeding, especially when you’re not in the studio.
Keep a notebook. Take audio notes on walks. Write on your sketches and preparation drawings rather than keeping them separate from your thinking.
When something catches your attention — a color, a story, a texture, a fact — stay with it long enough to ask why. Then ask why again.
That habit of asking is what distinguishes artists who make a lot of good individual pieces from those who build a meaningful body of work.
4 thoughts on “How curiosity and research deepen your studio practice (268)”
Your post is very timely, Alyson. I am learning that when I spend time at the beginning of a new body of work doing the exploration, writing and research, my work becomes deeper and more meaningful. My recent art residency was about laying a foundation with mind maps and writing before any art making and my sketchbooks have become daily reflections of what has worked/not worked from the previous day, some ideas and plans for that present day and then, after that, sketches or sampling. I hadn’t thought that the planning stage would be so necessary to build a good foundation…thinking that I could just leap into the art making filled with good intentions…but then the work usually went sideways quickly.
Susan: I can see this for/in you. As they say … “measure twice, cut once.” It pays off to do the hard work up front.
The podcast was so inspiring Alyson! It’s very timely as well since I’m in an exploratory stage right now and can certainly attest to the growth I’ve had staying in that space & going deeper even though I don’t know where I’ll end up. You’ve also inspired me to do more research on my current project of Spain works (based on the residency I did last fall). Thank you!
Pratima: What are you curious about from your time in Spain?
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