Anna and I have joined forces with our talented friend Todd Bonita to share studio space at the Western Avenue Studios in Lowell, Mass. The building is huge - 200 artists or so - and it's a short trip from Anna's mom's house in Hollis, N.H. We'll be working here when not in Rollinsford, and we hope to participate in open studios on the first Saturday of every month and around the holidays. There's also an opportunity to have work on display in the studio building's art gallery, the Loading Dock Gallery.
I'm eventually hoping to offer painting classes here once we've actually put down roots.
The place is alive with creative energy and a strong sense of communal focus. It feels like a great way to branch out in a new community and establish a presence closer to Boston, plus it'll be easier to get here from the Hollis outpost than to drive all the way to Rollinsford should serious studio time be a necessity.
Todd and I want to furnish it in the best classic nineteenth-century American artist style - oriental carpet, plaster busts, enormous easels, bearskin rugs, a preserved mongoose and priceless "curiosities" from Egypt and the congo in an adjacent "parlour" lit by beeswax candles and Victorian gas-lamps... er... an oriental carpet...
We're all really excited about what feels like a great new venture into the bright unknown.
preserved mongoose, bearskin rug...I was cracking up reading this...where do you come up with it? I can almost smell the pipe smoke and hear our sophisticated pontifications on the art world as we loosen the chrystal topper of our rare scotch decanter...let the good times roll my good man.
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