Dreaming up room for creativity
How creating a space really creates your life.
If you’ve been following along on The Smart Creative, Monica has mentioned that we are building a house and studio in farm country just outside of Providence. It’s been an amazing process to start with our ideas and sketches and slowly see this building take shape. Building a house is such an audacious act, full of challenges at every turn. In the face of constant decision-making, friction with the builder, and surprises that always seem to drive up the costs, it’s easy to lose sight of what brought us to building in the first place. Monica and I have spacious studios in an old mill building in Pawtucket, home to several artist’s studios. There are high ceilings, tall windows and plenty of room to make work at any scale. We’re just a few minutes from our house and convenient to art supply stores, good restaurants for lunch, and the Providence Art Club – so why take on this project?
The short answer is that we had the idea that we might find a property with an old barn or a little land that we could renovate or build a studio to consolidate our lives without the expense of renting studios. After some searching – Monica will tell you, not enough – we struck on the idea of building from scratch and began to look at land. We made sketches, found inspirations, and began designing. Often, we worked more like artists, cutting and collaging floorplans together in order to visualize the spaces we were looking for.
We got input from my uncle Bill, a fantastic architect in his own right; our neighbors, a young couple of architects; and a wonderful interior design team that shares our vision. Many months later, we have a building underway that looks very much like we drew it to be. There’s a way to go, but we are now at the exciting stage of choosing finish materials and laying out the interior. While still a mess of a job site, we can almost picture us living there.
I often give my students an assignment to write about their dream studio. I give them prompts to help them think about the kind of space that they would most like to work in. I ask them to picture the location, whether it’s an urban studio, near the beach, or out in the country. Do they see a large, industrial space or an intimate space no bigger than their desktop? They consider what tools are available in this space and the materials they would use... etc.Â
 All this to begin visualizing the work they would most like to make. It’s really a question of what kind of an artist do you want to be. Â
The studio is, after all, a reflection of the artist and the work that comes out of that space, is a product of that environment.
We visited Monet’s house and garden in Giverny a couple of years ago, which might be the most fabulous environment an artist has ever made for their work. Monet’s real studio, of course, was the gardens. The flower beds, the little pink house, and of course, the water gardens with their lilies were the subjects of Monet’s work. You can picture him painting outside on the paths or along the water in the shade to the sound of the stream he diverted to create the ponds in the Japanese garden. After working in a smaller studio in the house for years, he built a large, warehouse-like space to create his masterworks, the series of waterlilies painted in his later years. He designed large skylights and windows draped with cloth shades with an elaborate system to control the natural light. On our visit to Giverny, standing in the bookshop, I looked up and realized that we were standing in that very studio, the place where the magic happened. Â
The studio I have always admired in pictures is DeKooning’s studio in the Springs in the Hamptons. It’s a mid-century modern, high-ceilinged structure with light, space, and a vantage point from the house. Pictures show him small in the space, working on a makeshift easel made for the large-scale canvases that were his trademark. Everything about the space has a cool, sixties vibe that speaks to how contemporary his work was in its time.
As we designed our new studios, the question for us is what kind of artists do we want to be? What kind of space will inspire us in the years to come? More than anything, we knew we needed light and airy spaces. Our painting requires space and good, steady light. We also knew we wanted something of Giverny surrounding our studio. We picture gardens, flowers, grasses and trees – the things that are the subjects of our work. It turns out we designed and are building not just a house but a life together.
A place where art and beauty will be central to our everyday lives.
We will each have a space to paint that reflects our personalities (I picture modernist furniture in my studio and a disco ball in Monica’s!) We will wander outside to work the gardens or linger on the porch to watch the trees and birds. We will cook beautiful meals, throw fabulous dinner parties and open our home and studios to friends to share in the delight of a creative life. It will all be worth it in the end because we did it together.
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