The art studio

What does your art studio (or art space) look like?

We are incredibly fortunate to have an actual art studio as part of our house. Granted, it also doubles as general storage and Where The Hell Do We Put That Stuff While We Decide What To Do With It space. Hence (and I can use this as my excuse), it's always pretty messy. The Husband was teasing me about that fact, and it does seem a bit odd, because in the rest of my life I like to be rather neat, but it's true--the studio is often a disaster. HOWEVER, I do know where (most) everything that I need is. (And NB: these pics are just a couple of days AFTER I did a pretty major cleaning/reorganizing in there.)

Anyway, I was recently reading a small book called Living the Artist's Life (by Paul Dorrell). It's a rather opinionated, all-over-the-place piece of writing, but it had its moments. One I especially appreciated was how you go into these museums and see these wonderful works of art in these very special spaces designed just for the piece of artwork, or at least arranged to complement it, and you're not supposed to touch it, and everything is very clean and "manicured," etc.  So one thing I really liked was when the author of this book reminded us readers that every single piece of art you see in the museum came from someone's messy art studio somewhere. And that not only did a beautiful piece come from a messy, cluttered, disorganized, possibly dirty space, but that sometimes that was the only worthwhile piece that ever came out of that studio.

So what does all this mean? Possibly just that when we make two or three things in our life that are rather wonderful, we should feel perfectly satisfied.

More art on my website: jalapfaff.com