If you drive by our house in the little midwestern town we call home and see lights in the third-floor windows, you know I am in my studio, happily making some kind of a mess. When I was a girl, growing up in the lovely town of New Providence in northern New Jersey, I longed for a studio space like the one I have now, a place dedicated to just being creative in whatever way seemed good and right to me.
New Providence is about twenty-five miles from Manhattan and there were mansions in our community built as summer homes by wealthy New Yorkers at the turn of the last century. The mothers of that time would take their children to their country “cottage” for the summer and the husbands would take the train from the city on the weekends. I would pass these homes, many of which were owned by an aging man or woman who used only the first-floor rooms and I dreamed of having some of that unused space for myself. I fantasized about sneaking into one of those enormous old homes and making a studio in the attic. It would be a large, airy space with many windowed gables and have room to really spread out. I’d be quiet as a mouse, and they would never know I was there!
Of course, I never had the courage to sneak into one of those houses, but over the years I managed to convert some small space into a place where I could work. As a teenager, I rigged up an unfinished door on top of an old dresser, then built shelves on top and squeezed it into a corner of my bedroom. When Skip and I were married, I moved the door/dresser/shelf unit to the spare bedroom of our farmhouse apartment. When we bought our first home, back in Reading Pennsylvania, I had the opportunity to really spread my wings. That old house had six bedrooms to play in but we lived there only two years and I never really got a studio space organized. Too bad because the third-floor bedrooms were charming spaces with lots of light.
We lived in a modest home in Anchorage while our kids were growing up and there wasn’t much time for a creative life back then, but when both kids grew up and left home, I turned the second bedroom into a pretty decent art space. But now, more than fifty years after
fantasizing about a space in one those old mansions, I have the space I dreamed of in the converted attic of our old house here in Michigan. Of course, when we moved in here twenty years ago it was just an unconverted, uninsulated attic space with a couple of tiny windows. But we were lucky to have some young men working with us to restore the house, which had been neglected for many years, and they turned the attic into a bright, spacious workspace I am enjoying today. I even have a skylight over my workbench!
I call this space HandBlarney Studio, a name I selected at least fifty years ago. Blarney is the gift of gab, they say, or more precisely, the gift of using language creatively. HandBlarney is the gift of using your hands creatively. May your life be enriched with this gift and may you use it to create wonderful things.
Gail Hollinger
June 11, 2024
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