STUDIO SERIES: Joel Tomlin & John Joseph Mitchell

Studio Series explores artists’ practices through the spaces and routines that shape the way they work.  In answering a series of questions, each artist offers a glimpse into their daily rituals and working processes.

The first two artists in this series are Joel Tomlin and John Joseph Mitchell, coinciding with their joint exhibition at Ingleby, which opened on 26 September 2026. 

John and Joel, where are your studios? Please can you both describe them?

John Joseph Mitchell: I live and work in an old wood house that was built sometime around 1800. The front parlor room serves as my painting studio. A glass paned door with two sidelights on either side opens into the studio from a large sitting room. There are two tall windows opposite it, a window on the south side, and a door with a window that opens to the front porch on the north side. A few tables and a bench I made line the walls and are covered with books and drawings. Two easels hold 4 or 5 paintings each at various stages of completion. In the middle of the room is the easel I work at, a cart, and a chair. At the back of the house on the second floor in a nook of the hallway there is a small wood shop where I make my panels and frames and such. A door from that nook opens up to a small room with a pitched ceiling that serves as my printmaking studio.

Joel Tomlin: I have two studios, one in East London and one in Germany, Northern Frankenwald… At the time of writing this I am in the cabin in Germany, the more rural of the two. What similarities these studios have is that I have furnished them both with found furniture, chairs etc., and have made the benches myself. Neither rely on much electricity, yet I feel as though I get different results from them both. The Autumn light that I am experiencing right now for instance is a world away from the basement in London where I have probably passed by 2000 people to get there in the morning.

What is the first thing that you do when you enter the studio?

John: When I get into the studio I flip through a book and look at paintings for a bit. After a while I’ll start shuffling around, looking at things, maybe move some paintings, start mixing colors. I’ll tinker with a painting that is in its early stages or that needs to be covered to loosen up. Then I begin to work more earnestly.

Joel: On arrival at the studio I will usually put the kettle on and switch off the phone…. Less of a decompression, more like a sense of being present in the room. Sometimes there’s a few minor, unrelated practical tasks that I have started - repairing clothes, mending objects etc that I find help with dexterity and ease me into picking up a piece to work on.

What are you working on right now?

John: Getting the paintings to have a unified surface is an everlasting goal. For the past several years that has often meant trying to execute the paintings more or less in one sitting. Regularly covering up or wiping away and restarting many times over weeks or months. But while looking at some of my drawings and pastels recently I became excited by the cohesion of their many layers of marks. The opposite of how I have been thinking. I am trying to figure out how that could happen in the paintings more. As a result I am working on a lot of them at once. Maybe 10 or so. I am trying to build them up more slowly and loosely. It has been a challenge and an exciting one.

Joel: I am always working on a number of pieces at once... There’s fragments that have been lying around for years and some that have been back and forth in my suitcase between studios, so nothing specific. I will sense a ‘quickening’ in certain pieces and they will come together as if ordained by themselves… can’t really describe that chain of activity.

What references have you each found yourself returning to recently? 

John: I have been looking at a lot of Seurat. Particularly his studies and smaller paintings. The way the loose indirect paint strokes are used to build these rigid almost mathematical compositions is really great.

Joel: The references that I am likely to keep returning to will be usually tied up with (again) a bunch of dog-eared clippings and postcards that are either stored or propped up and scattered around - highly tenuous subjects, a couple of vagrants from the Camargue region, a perforated Inuit carving, black and white photo examples of makeshift beehives. After a while a germination starts to take place out of the corner of my eye, whilst I am working on something completely unrelated.

Do you listen to music in the studio? If so, would you be willing to put together a small track list for us? 

John: Music is vital. I listen to a lot of it, not always when I paint though. Sometimes I need quiet. So as a compromise here is a collection of 12 solo instrumental songs, 6 guitar and 6 piano.

Joel: I don’t listen to music at all - I used to but find it very distracting, particularly anything with lyrics, classical music is too serious to have as a background and I am always wanting to make something that I feel is superior to its surroundings. I feel that is less likely if there’s a brilliant musician in the room with me.

Is there anything talismanic that you keep in the studio - an object or something special?

John: I am not sure there is any one thing that is talismanic.  My house is full of old furniture and books and my paintings and prints as well as those by friends. Things that I want to live with and look at repeatedly and hold. Things that do for me what I hope my paintings will do for others.

Joel: I have been persistent in making small solid objects that relate to bottles, gourds, figs and such like. They populate the studios and I feel as though the arcane shape of them is redolent of a battery or incubator of some description, conveying a sense of latent energy, it is purely associative magic but they seemingly serve me well.

Images courtesy of the Artists.

Joel Tomlin studio photography: Beate Schäuble, Michael Degan and Andy Keate.