Studio Shuffle

My new space, freshly painted.

There's been a lot going on in the last few weeks.
Today, I finished painting my new studio. It's not really a "new" studio.  I am just shifting rooms from a room towards the back closer to the street and front access. One of our 4 artists moved out. My neighbor took the front room and I decided that since I am hoping to start teaching moku hanga classes in Florence that having our rooms contiguous would allow us to occasionally share spaces (each room alone is only big enough for 3-4 students but together can host up to 8-10).
I took advantage of the emptied room to repaint it but that meant pulling down lots of ugly shelves, patching holes, painting the walls and today finishing the painted baseboard. While the rest of the studio is peaceful, neutral beige/off-white, I went with colors a bit more fanciful.
The back wall is a white indoor house paint with a ton of leftover dry pigment mixed in: mostly phthalo blue and burnt umber.

This is the space before painting.

And after.

While this is my current room--charming but very cluttered.

Tomorrow I will start moving stuff forwards but as you can see from my old room photos, I've accumulated a lot of stuff and hope I can take advantage of the move to get rid of many things that don't belong.
But while I hope to get moved in very soon, it may be a bit before I can get any real work done:

I'm preparing for the Japanese Cultural Fair that opens in 2 weeks and where I'll be doing a printing demonstration and I found out today that I will be assisting and supervising a stonecarving studio's independent study for a local, private Exchange program one day a week through December.
Plus I have shallots and garlic to plant, and fields to prepare for next year.
Not to mention New prints to start and finish.

Paper Storage

I'm finally the proud owner of a new (but used) flat file. All it took was patience, an internet connection, Ebay.it and a car big enough to haul the thing home.....

This has been typical of my paper storage system up to now. I've kept my rolls of good paper in Large diameter PVC pipes up in the rafters of my small Santa Cruz art shed but when I came to Italy the paper I brought with me ended up in Cardboard tubes or boxes. I've gotten the really good paper out of the cardboard--it's too acidic and will damage the paper if it lives there too long so most of the rolls have been placed in an outer sheet of cotton rag/artist paper.

The obvious problem is it's hard to keep track of what I have and where it is and as I need to cut sheets down to size for printing--the heavier papers don't like being unrolled and have to be weighted down.

So, I've been looking for a used flat file for ages.  In Italy, new, they're frightfully expensive but I couldn't rationalize or justify spending that much for my little "hobby"......so I've been regularly trawling Ebay.it and Kijiji ( a kind of Italian craigslist) hoping to find a used one.

And this week not one but TWO showed up on Ebay; One was in nearby Lucca (1 hr away). I put in a low bid but I had no competition and finally and for a little more than $150 I now have a big, steel, flat file. I did have to take the back seats out of my car; drive there and back, load the thing into the car and then haul it back and put it together again....but it took just a few hours...

I didn't think to ask the dimensions so I was a bit chagrined to learn it is one of the big ones....
140cm long, 95 cm deep and 55 cm tall.....that's 55"x 37".....more than big enough!

I still have to go through my tubes and label the drawers, and get the paper stored away.

I feel more organized already.

Cracks and clutter

When cracks appeared in the arched, brick ceiling of the stone farmhouse we live in it meant that one of the walls had shifted and the vaulted ceiling, very stable as long as the vaults are intact, had begun to open.
As one engineer said to us..."they could stay up another 50 years or all come down tomorrow....".
As there is a another floor above this and we pretty much live in the kitchen we had no alternative.
We emptied out the room above; supported the vaulted roof from below with scaffolding, and rebuilt the floor from above after taking out the brick floor and sand and mortar that was laid on top of the vaults.

Lots more was involved but for the purpose of today's little discussion all the stuff that was in the room above; desks, tables, 2 armoires full of linens and clothes, bookcases, pictures, etc. etc. ended up in the spare bedroom that is also my studio.
So while the room was difficult to work in before due to the multiple uses it had to perform.
Now it is only barely possible to enter; and fully impossible to work in.
My wife is convinced that if I would only spend 1/2 hour "arranging" the furniture I'd still be able to work in it just fine but I know I can't.
And not only because there is a marble table top in front of my desk; obstructing the drawers and chair. I had hoped things would go quickly but we are now entering the second month and I'm going crazy.
This is the state of my current work space:

I've a print to finish and I am still trying to limbo my way under the two stacked desks, wriggle between the two armoires, slip to the floor and try to go under the table and using an umbrella, snag the tool box with all my tools.

I'm working on another solution and think I'll have a new work space to call home in just a few days.

Toadprints at Coffeetopia!

Well, it's official:

Shapes and Postures, recent prints 2008-2011
by Andrew Stone
went up today and will be on display until April 15th.

We hung 19 prints this afternoon at Coffeetopia, 1723 Mission St; Santa Cruz: a local, popular coffeehouse. No photos yet, I left my camera at home and was whizzing about trying to get them all up after the shop closed. Dave the owner graciously helped hang the prints and adjusted the lighting.
All that's left to do is sneak in in the morning and put up all the identification tags of the framed prints.

There will be a mid-show opening March 25th 6-8p and I hope anyone in the Santa Cruz, South Bay or San Francisco area can come!