People frequently ask me about my studio when they find out I’m an artist. My art “studio”, such as it is, has always been a small portion of a room in our home. For many years now, it has shared space in the basement rec room, with the family desktop computer and sole printer, along with the ONLY television in the house. Pre-pandemic, this sharing of space wasn’t a huge issue, I made due at home for small projects and borrowed space in a friend’s studio for larger work. Actually, I spent a lot of time in that friend’s studio...until COVID.
Suddenly, that other studio space wasn’t available.
I needed to make space in my own home, since that seemed to be (and has proved to be) where I’ll be working for the most part for the foreseeable future. And I need space to make larger works.
It seemed like a simple enough proposition: Find another spot in the house for the television, get rid of some extra furniture, move a few things around and -- presto-- I would have my studio, that whole basement room to myself. Back in April, I even bought myself an easel, stashing its box in the garage till that little re-organization process was done.
Do I actually need to say that there has been nothing simple about this process
Remember that game you play with dominos, where you set them up on end, one behind the other, and one must fall before the next can fall--that kind of approximates what we had to go through, except in reeeeaaaalllly slow motion. The photo here of the lists of what had to happen first, then next, only scratches the surface of what we went through, since it doesn’t include the three (!!!) separate trips comprising many hours my husband made to the nearest Verizon store for equipment needed to deal with the television move (and did I mention that our lone tv was 14 years old and so we had to upgrade?), nor the hours spent on hold with Verizon to get all the new equipment to actually talk to each other.
But this is supposed to be about my studio, not the television ( kudos to my husband, nonetheless!).
Bit by bit, the dominos fell. Furniture donated or moved. Space cleared. All the items on the long lists checked off.
In celebration last week, I finally put together the lovely easel I so optimistically purchased back in April when repurposing this room seemed like a simple weekend project. It had gathered quite a bit of dust in the garage over the intervening months. But when I opened the box, the clean smell of its beechwood drifted like a promise through the room; it was the scent of creativity, the promise of struggle, the anticipation of beauty in the making.
Easel-in-a-box!
Sturdy and big enough for some good-sized canvases—check back to see it in use!
Always good to have a helper when you have to put together one of those things that only has pictures to guide you to assemble.