The Painting Studio

Mary Ahern's painting studio

This is my painting studio with work in progress as I prepare for a show.

Mary Ahern the Artist at her painting easel in the studio

I have a solid oak easel to work on my paintings which slides up and down which is useful when I’m painting larger canvases. Next to me on my right is my palette and brushes. I usually stand when I’m working in oils or acrylic paints.

The Painting Studio is where I create and experiment with a variety of mediums to create my Art. For many years I’ve worked in Oils, Acrylics and Watercolors as well as dry mediums like pastel, colored pencil and graphite. Most often I combine some of these into my Mixed Media paintings. There is a large size easel to accommodate the canvas paintings and drafting tables for drawings and colored pencil work.

The palette and brushes are on a table next to the easel. I don’t like to hold the palette even though it has a nicely romantic notion of what an artist should look like. The brushes stand in clay flower pots (a nice touch since I paint mostly flowers and gardens) and are held with aquarium stone since it slides easily. I group the brushes by type so that it’s easy to find what I need.

I use a glass palette on a white table. It’s easy to keep clean with a scraping razor. While I’m working I rest my brushes on ceramic stands to keep the paint and table clean. Near me is a poster near as a reference which clearly indicates the transparency of certain pigments since I work a lot in glazing techniques. I find this both colorful and useful.

I have specialized illumination installed that is balanced for color accuracy specific to fabric design studios since so much work is done on canvas. I’ve written about how I went about selecting the lighting in my studio in my Art Blog post here. The primary window lighting is north light which reduces color shifts as the sun moves during a day of painting. Since color is extremely important to me I need to control the balance of lighting in the studio.


Oil Painting Palette in the studio of Mary Ahern

Generally I use a glass palette and scrape it clean with a razor at the end of each day. I line the tubes up to match how I have the pigment on the palette so I can quickly and easily choose the right color when I’m adding more paint to the palette. I lay out the pigments in spectrum colors for the most part.


All my paintings are for sale to bring sunshine to your home or office.
Please visit me here at my Shop.
Don’t forget, if you don’t find your dream come true, I love to work with clients on their own special projects.
You can reach me here: Contact Mary