Last week I bid farewell to my wonderful studio space at Marywood that was so large I could do twirls and somersaults and handstands and cartwheels in it if I wanted to. I don’t remember actually doing any of those acrobatics in there, but I really wouldn’t be surprised if I did. Painting can be frustrating, you know.

Anyways, I’m back home in Lancaster County now, and my bedroom doubles as my studio. Besides it being a fraction of the size of my studio at school (I don’t know the exact fraction, that is complicated math, my people), there are some other huge differences I did not really take into account or notice until I set it up.

1. Bad lighting. Universities can afford this beautiful thing I like to call ‘normal lighting.’ You know, where there’s light bulbs that just miraculously hang from the ceiling. In my 200 year old house, however, most of our tiny rooms do not have this glorious ‘technology.’ Instead, I just place little desk lamps around my room and hope for the best. I usually don’t actually get ‘the best,’ but I can see what is five feet in front of me, for the most part.
2. No easels. This one is actually pretty annoying, and something I should probably consider fixing soon, since there’s only so much painting on the ground or painting on the bed someone can do.
3. Different noises. You know, Amish people yelling outside your window, mom yelling inside your house, dogs barking at each other. The usual stuff. Gone are the days when all you hear in your studio are the swishes of brushes or the soft chatter of the teacher and other students critiquing the artwork. Now the noises you hear are much more random, and much less directed towards your work. *disclaimer: I do not speak dog, so I cannot be 100% sure that they are not barking about my work. Maybe the reason they don’t shut up at night is because they’re trying to tell me to change a certain color on one of my paintings?*