Category: Inside the Studio

After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design last year, Bo Kyung Kim was looking for a studio in Providence. She wanted a studio near her home or work since she didn’t have a car and winters in that area can be quite cold. None met these requirements, so she decided to set up a studio at home. She’s pleased that in her home-based studio, she can easily do the technique of layering and sealing using Hanji, traditional Korean paper. “Hanji appears most beautifully under sunlight,” said Kyung Kim. “Warmth and sunlight coming through a big window creates a peaceful moment for me to meditate, which leads to the biggest inspiration of my work.”

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For the past thirty years, Bette Ridgeway has worked full-time as an artist, painting colorful canvases in large and small studios. Most recently, she converted a 14′ x 14′, light-filled bedroom in her Santa Fe home into a working studio. She removed doors from a long closet and put in three large metal bookcases to store art supplies. This allows her to preserve floor space so that she can create paintings as long as 130 inches. For large commissions, she also has access to a big warehouse with a 13′ ceiling.

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Nancy McTague-Stock has worked in various studios, both here and abroad, including in an old castle in the Champagne-Ardenne region of France last October. She received the Denis Diderot grant, which funded part of her stay, in a tiny village surrounded by green fields and forests. There, working in a small studio, she was inspired to work on small photographic pieces and works on paper instead of large paintings as she would back in her Connecticut studio.

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Thirty years ago, sculptor Margaret Swan converted a garage at her home into an artist studio. The five-hundred-square-foot garage, which is behind her Victorian house in a Boston suburb, boasts a high-peaked roof loft space. “It is not a source of inspiration, but a place for inspiration to take place,” says Swan.

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More than twenty-five years ago, PD Packard bought a boarded-up brownstone in Brooklyn that had been vacant for a decade. Friends nicknamed it the Adam’s family house, but to her, the entire home was inspirational, allowing her to express her true love, color—contrasting sharply with the Federal brick colonial she grew up in the suburbs of Washington, DC, where all the walls were painted white.

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This fall, artist Rosalyn Driscoll said goodbye to her beautiful, downtown studio. For thirty years, she’d rented the 1,200-square-foot studio in a former factory in Easthampton, MA. But escalating rents, a need for more storage space, and a desire for a shorter commute pushed her to move into a newly built studio in an open field a hundred yards from her home in rural western Massachusetts. “The new studio provides spaciousness and freedom,” she says. “It offers grounding and a stable connection to so much I hold dear.”

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Metal sculptor Monica Coyne is inspired by the rainforest surrounding her forge shop, a forty-minute drive from the nearest town in Humboldt County, California. Every day, she opens two roll-up doors, onto a view of mature madrones and towering firs. It doesn’t matter if it’s raining—that area averages eighty inches of rain in winter—or hot as in summer when temperatures climb to 105 degrees: “The rain, the fog, and the crisp crackling leaves at the height of the dry summer fill my brain with thoughts about our connection to everything,” says Coyne. “Transferring these thoughts to cold, black, industrially manufactured steel creates a fascinating dichotomy. This drives my work.”

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