Up at Utopian.net right now I have a picture of the horse and carriage that magically appeared on my street a couple of days ago.
And for LiveJournal, some pictures of my newly cleaned studio, in preparation for the redecorating challenge I have given myself. I have $20 to make my studio look like a creative environment instead of
the jumbled mass of boxes it is. I plan on using a lot of papier mache and leftover fabric. I’ll post craft entries about the really neat stuff.
This isn’t my studio, it’s my container garden. But that’s alright, it’s good place to start.
I have some nifty stuff growing here – a rose that insists on dying and resurrecting itself everytime it pops a bud, a moonflower, an avocado plant, some anise hyssop and alpine strawberries, and three kinds of basil. Not bad for being on the third floor, and facing east…
This isn’t my studio either, it’s my auxiliary studio. What would be the dining room in any other apartment here is the library for us, and it is appropriately full of books, cigars, paintings, plants, and
fishing equipment. I use it as dinner eating space or drawing space, and often cuddling-up-and-reading space. The paintings are by me, largely unfinished, and they are resting on a 1915 White Rotary sewing machine. It’s a cast-iron beast.
This is my studio. Well, one area of it anyway. The last time I reorganized, I set up “stations”. This is the papercrafting station, and has my equipment for bookbinding, collage, polymer sculpting, kinetic paper sculpting, mail art, and stamping. And some of my sewing stuff. And some of my drawing stuff. The clock on the window sill is actually black metal, but it disappeared in the picture.
This is on the opposite wall from the paper stuff. It’s where I’m forced to both paint and develop photos or make polaroid transfers. Right now I’m in the middle of doing some mixed media paintings for the walls of the cafe, so my photo stuff is neatly jammed under the desk. The stuff on the wall is coming down soon, but it includes the famous Anne Boleyn glow-in-the-dark doll that is holding her own head. J. got it for me one day because the other dolls in the series were Napoleon, Lincoln, and Poe, and it just tickled him to think that I might collect all four.
Only half of my camera collection is in this picture. The other half is
Hanging on a hook next to my head as I type this, as you can see in the picture. This is the “closet” of the bedroom my studio has taken over, and my computer is in here to reduce monitor glare. The collage on the wall is the same collage I had up in my first apartment when I was seventeen. I found the envelope containing all the images when we moved in, so I put it up for lack of anything else. On my desk, though you may not be able to see it, is my little ceramic frog, a picture of K. propped up in a carved balsa wood hand from Indonesia, my tarot cards, a new cucumber-melon candle from , a ruler, and my graphics tablet, which I love like ice cream.
On top of my scanner in the pic is a ball of yarn and a crochet hook which I had to bring in when my cable went out and pages were taking years to load. I had to do something with my hands or I was going to freak out. It never occurred to me to just walk away.
I’m interested in seeing others’ work spaces. The redecorating project is for an article I’m doing about redecorating apartment spaces without doing anything permanent, for issue #2 of the zine.