Assembling a Studio 2: The New Space
Shooting in Panorama feels like overkill for a 6 tatami mat room...
This is not the dream.
The dream is more spacious, better lit, differently organized. The dream offers options and better storage. The dream has nicer furniture, climate control, and walls I can nail things into.
This is, however, a perfectly fine reality. More importantly, for the next however-long-we-live-here, this is the art studio.
So yes, there have been some compromises. Reality imposes itself like that.
Reality, in the Osaka area at least, seems to lack storage.
That’s the biggest - well, actually smallest - hiccup. The last place had tons of closet space for all of packing materials I had collected over years. I sadly had to bid goodbye to all those styrofoam boxes and air packets.
I’m a little sad that my art desk is facing the wall. Again. Ideally, it would be facing into the room. When it comes time to choose papers and colors for the work, giant sheets of paper need to sprawl, so my goal was to maximize floorspace while still having areas to cut and draw, store stuff and compute.
Oh, and then there’s the tatami floor. I love tatami… just not in a work room. Who knows, maybe it will inspire me.
A few weeks ago, I was writing about my first Relics artwork. I mentioned that limitations and boundaries can help give rise to creativity. This is as true for physical spaces as for artwork.
The layout of the furniture here is, I think, a lot more logical and conducive to work than in the old place. Precious space is utilized in ways I never would have thought of before.
Bookshelves are under the deep desk - that’s where my tax info goes. The compact closet is segmented into layers and pockets, each customized to suit a different purpose - artwork storage, packing materials, some merchandise, art supplies, unmentionable horrors, etc… Most importantly, I went through all of the detritus that had collected over the past near-decade and culled anything that didn’t make sense to my current and future work, or the way I now create.
There’s still a bunch left to do, of course. There’s a box of partially used paper that, somehow, needs to be organized. There’s a pile of paperwork that I don’t want to ditch but don’t quite know where to file away.
