When we moved into our house in 2016, I told Adrianne how much I couldn’t wait to convert two of the downstairs spaces into studios. “Day one,” I told her. As is often the case with home projects, things don’t always go to plan and day one is now year six and the spaces, while functional, still aren’t done. However, more progress has been made in recent weeks, including actually swapping the spaces—my former paint space is now my digital space and vice versa. The big reason for the switch was down to the way our house is constructed. All of the plumbing is on the North side of the house—along with my former digital/podcasting space—which meant that whenever someone upstairs used any water at all when I was recording, the mics would pick it up. Swapping the spaces basically resolved the issue, to the point where we can even do laundry and the mics don’t pick up a thing. At the time of this recording, carpet has been put down, lighting instruments are installed, walls have been painted (or repainted, as the case may be) and some of the furniture has been purchased. In terms of big pieces, all that’s left is to build some acoustic panels for the digital studio and to build the three modular work benches I want for the paint studio.
I’ve talked about the importance of the way a space feels before and despite the fact that I recorded a number of podcast episodes and made quite a few paintings the way the spaces were arranged before, swapping them just feels better—even though they still aren’t done—and I can’t quite figure out why. I can’t even define what I mean by better, but there’s definitely something—even Adrianne has noticed it. Despite being slightly different shapes, they’re both about the same square footage, the lighting instruments in the ceiling are the same in each space. The digital space where I’m recording now has better natural light, which you would think would have been better for painting, but for whatever reason, I really prefer this set up. The only thing that’s missing—and it’s more of a nice to have than a must have—is another dedicated space for the woodworking tools I use to build my larger cradled panels. It’s really just a matter of convenience and dealing with all of the dust from cutting and sanding the wooden frames. I can certainly make them in the paint studio—and have—but it would be great to eventually have a dedicated space that’s more shop than studio, and one that’s not attached to the house. My dad always had a workshop of some sort, usually just a converted garage. The crown jewel was the massive shop he had built on his property in Arizona. I think it was 40x60 feet with an upstairs mezzanine and roll-up doors on each end. It really was a terrific space. Half of it was set up as a wood shop and the other half was for metal working. It had multiple welders, a plasma cutter, and a 4x8 foot CNC table. He also had a hydraulic lift, a custom-built paint station with a vacuum system for fume removal, and almost every kind of pneumatic tool you could think of. In fact, he had so much stuff that, after he died, my stepmother donated it all to a school that was able to start a whole new metalworking program. The real brilliance of his set up was that it meant there was very little friction between ideation and realization. Nearly anything he could imagine or sketch out on a scrap of paper—which happened often—he could go out to the shop and build. For the odd thing he couldn’t manage on his own, he would reach out to a network of maker-friends that could fill in the gaps.
Though it’s on a much smaller scale, I’m trying to accomplish more or less the same thing with my studios—lessening the friction between ideation and realization, between thinking and doing. I’ve spoken before about the physical differences between the way our house feels upstairs vs. downstairs and how those differences help to allow me to effectively separate myself from the rest of the house, which has become even more important on the backside of Covid and Adrianne working mostly from home. With these newly-reconfigured spaces, instead of splitting the time with another room upstairs—in my case, an empty bedroom adjacent to our bedroom—I feel more like I’m going to another physical place, and in the case of my paint studio, that even means a different set of clothes. Just like Mr. Rogers would change into his cardigan sweater and Sperry sneakers at the start of each episode, when I go into the studio, I put on a paint-spattered black hoodie and a pair of equally spattered boots before trying to arrange paint and paper just so to bring my ideas to life.
Having dedicated spaces for making has become an important, though stressful, part of my process, especially with regard to my paintings—and the longer the rooms have remained in this weird flux, the less new work I find myself finishing or am even able to start. I’ve done a few painting projects, but nothing with the volume or regularity that I had hoped for. Podcasting has recently taken a hit as well. Sean and I decided to take a step back from doing Deep Natter as a weekly show and instead go to twice monthly, partially so I can finish the spaces and get a handle on some of the projects that I haven’t been able to get to, such as the relaunch of Process Driven as well as the development of new podcast, and a potential YouTube show. I’m also trying to figure out originals and prints of my work and possibly a zine project, but more on all of that later. Add to all of this the fact that finishing the spaces requires reconciling feelings around worth and value in terms of deserving them to begin with—something I’ve struggled with for a long time—and you can start to see that it’s a complicated cycle.
Here’s the takeaway. For me, where the work is made has become equally important to how the work is made, if for no other reason than it has the potential to allow me to feel more intentional and less distracted in the space and just focus on the making. I remember reading an article years ago that made a pretty strong case against having a television in the bedroom. The argument was that the more you see it, the more you use it, and the more you use it, the more you don’t do other things, like sleep. Maybe these spaces are a bit like that. Seeing what they are intended to be used for makes me more likely to do that thing when I’m in them. I hope that’s the case. Ask me in a few months.
Questions:
How does your creative space affect what and how you make? What about it is critical and is there anything missing?
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What is missing? Space. I really underestimated how much space I needed when I sold my old house and downsized. I went to far and now things are all over the place and I don’t start things because of the time it will take to align the needed things and then need to pack away when I am done for other work.
This also destroys my creativity at times because inspirations are largely hidden away as so not take up precious space.
Next space will have designated areas and I cannot wait.