Latest news with #artstudio
New York Times
08-07-2025
- Business
- New York Times
Lorna Simpson's Brooklyn Art Studio Is On the Market
When Lorna Simpson couldn't find the right spot for her Brooklyn art studio, she did what many artists in New York City often can only dream of doing: She had one built from the ground up. Ms. Simpson, renowned for her photographs and multimedia work, and her then-husband, the artist James Casebere, commissioned the British architect David Adjaye to design a building at 208 Vanderbilt Avenue in the Fort Greene neighborhood where a one-story garage previously stood. (It was one of Mr. Adjaye's first projects in the United States.) 'I could not find something that I liked that felt spacious and that did not feel like a tight traditional townhouse domestic space with limited free-wall space,' Ms. Simpson said in an email. The four-story, 22-foot-wide structure, which Mr. Adjaye called 'Pitch Black,' is clad in polypropylene panels on the front and side facades, while the back portion is mostly glass. Ms. Simpson created many of her works there, but today the building, which was completed in 2006, is mainly used for archiving and storage, as well as entertaining and hosting guests. Several years ago, Ms. Simpson moved her primary studio to a larger, leased commercial space nearby. Now she's putting the Vanderbilt Avenue building on the market with an asking price of $6.5 million, according to the broker, Leslie Marshall of the Corcoran Group, who is listing it with her colleague Nick Hovsepian. Annual property taxes are $12,161. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Daily Mail
05-07-2025
- Lifestyle
- Daily Mail
How a French interior designer transformed a run-down butchery into a sprawling four-storey home with an art studio
The home of French interior designer Marianne Evennou, 66, in Senlis – a quiet medieval town 45 minutes' drive from Paris – testifies to her skill for reworking micro-box apartments as macro spaces. The residence, a former run-down single-storey butchery, was transformed into a sprawling four-storey home-meets-art studio by Evennou and her husband Franck, an artist and sculptor. The couple bought the space – a raw, single-storey 400sq m cube – in 2008 to create a workshop for Franck, who was keen to increase the scale of his designs. But after a few years the couple decided to sell their nearby home (in a converted convent) and, rather than divide time between the properties, expand the studio into somewhere to live. Thus Evennou added three new levels: on the ground floor is the entrance hall, living room, kitchen, dining room and a new outdoor courtyard area. Industrial cast-iron columns that nod to the former butchery structure support the first-floor master bedroom suite, dressing room and Evennou's creative work studio. A guest bedroom and bathroom occupy the second floor. Evennou bought a small plot of land for a lower ground floor garden, too, with a studio overlooking it for Franck. Evennou has placed antiques and artisanal textiles throughout, alongside personal finds: drawings by their two children, paintings from grandparents, handmade ceramics from friends and flowers from the garden. Among the unique objects, an African fertility sculpture alludes to their shared creative journey. 'All our lives we have lived in smaller apartments,' says Evennou. 'It is a luxury to have space and quiet.'
New York Times
21-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
How a Neon Light Artist Spends Her Day in the Studio
Lena Imamura, in purple protective glasses, blasts electronic music in her Chinatown art studio in Manhattan as she carefully moves rigid glass between a series of flaming torches. As the glass shifts among three flames — one long, one sharp, one tiny and pointed — it gets softer and more pliable. Then she can bend it into any shape she wants. 'It's a real dance with this medium,' said Ms. Imamura, the 40-year-old co-owner of GLO Studio, a neon light studio. She added, 'It really is a rhythm, and so I need this electronic music, basically, to get in a rhythmic space and zen out and focus.' She then bombards the glass with 24,000 volts of electricity to burn out impurities, fills it with argon gas and seals it. 'Once you ignite the tube with electricity, that's when you see the light go on,' she said. 'And what I love about that process is it's like a microcosm of what it means to make a star.' Ms. Imamura's creativity goes back to her childhood in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Her father, an electronic musician, 'was always tinkering with things' and the two of them would snag discarded computers and other items from the street and repair them at home, she said. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
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Travel + Leisure
15-06-2025
- Travel + Leisure
Shoppers Transformed This On-Sale Shed Into a Camping Getaway and Tiny Waterfront House
Believe it or not, you don't have to pack luggage and hop on a plane to get away. Shoppers are investing in tiny homes that feel like an escape and won't break the bank, which leads us to the Handy Home Windemere Shed. People have transformed the contemporary construction into various types of spaces, including a camping getaway site, an extra office space, an art studio, and a tiny waterfront house. So, if a backyard retreat piques your interest, consider bringing this charming shed home while it's on sale for just under $3,000 at Wayfair. Measuring 10 feet wide, 12 feet deep, and 10 feet tall, and offering 120 square feet of floor space, this small space-friendly hut is whatever you make of it. For instance, one shopper, who loves being outdoors, turned it into a camping getaway site. Whereas another buyer transformed it into a work office and 'added a bathroom with a beautiful shower, toilet, and sink.' While several reviewers reported that it took them days to build the outdoor storage shed, many noted that the instructions were easy to follow, including one who mentioned that it 'came with everything that was needed and was exactly what I was looking for.' Plus, for security reasons, it has a rust- and corrosion-resistant handle with a lock and two keys. If you want to turn this shed into an art or yoga studio, you'll be happy to hear that it has a lot of windows (11, to be exact), which, as one reviewer said, gives it an 'open feeling.' The 6-foot-high double doors, which come pre-hung with integrated transom windows that help keep it ventilated, also don't go unnoticed. A shopper who was looking for something more elevated than a basic shed to store their patio furniture during the winter said, 'This sealed the deal' for them, adding that they were able to adjust the windows to fit their needs. Long story short, this woodshed provides a place to escape to year-round, and now is the time to invest while it's marked down at Wayfair. Below, we've rounded up a few more highly rated options that are worth the splurge, including a Handy Home Tribeca Shed that you can have installed for an additional fee (because why lift a finger if you don't have to?).
The Guardian
09-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Painting's dangerous work!' The artist whose tools are brushes and power sanders
'I'm just trying to get one step ahead of my paintings,' says Megan Rooney, who is surrounded by the vibrant, gestural abstract works in her studio. She moves through the space restlessly as we chat, rocking on to her tiptoes and arching her arms through the air in an echo of the curving strokes in the paintings. She calls it 'dangerous work', her slow, fraught process of creation. 'After a decade of serious painting,' she says, 'I still feel bewildered and beguiled.' Rooney, 40, grew up in Canada and now lives in London, where she is preparing for her forthcoming show at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac. She has a unique approach of adding and subtracting. She begins by adding paint to a blank canvas, then removes it with power sanders, then adds more on top, then removes it again, in a painstaking, almost bloody battle to find her way to the finished work. Each painting ends up with 10 or 15 other works beneath it. 'In the beginning of a painting's life,' she says, 'it's like meeting new people – superficial. Eventually they have something to tell me. In knowing and searching, the work finds its legs.' She seems both tortured and enraptured by the process. Its slowness sets her apart from many abstract painters, who tend to work in a rapid expressionist way. Rooney pushes back at being compared to them. Her paintings are defined by the prolonged accumulation of both paint, she says, and lived experiences, until they become strong enough to stand alone. 'I think that if you threw them out of the car on the highway, they'd just sprout legs and walk.' Most of the works are the same size, matching the wingspan of the average woman, although Rooney does make huge ones too, as well as murals. She refers to the works as 'people', telling me about their personalities and lineages. Heavily influenced by the seasons and the weather, they reflect the colour palette of their surroundings. 'The city is my main collaborator,' she says, although her works have a lot in common with much less urban paintings, too. There is a lot of late Monet here, and some of Joan Mitchell's verdant gestural brushstrokes. (An exhibition bringing Rooney and Mitchell together is open until October at Espace Louis Vuitton Beijing.) The magnetic, bright and varied colours pull you in. Each shade is so exact, so bright and flat: the warm, clay reds in Old Rome, painted this year, are set against the perfect cerulean and purple of an early evening Italian sky; the oddly matte lavenders that dot many of Rooney's new works are an icily satisfying periwinkle; the pale pinks make me think of French rococo painting and Gainsborough's aristocratic skirts. The canvases seem to glow. They are already old souls when they are first exhibited, after so many iterations on the way to the finish line. As we pace around the studio, pausing in front of works to survey them, Rooney tells me about the importance of movement in her practice. She has a background in dance, which is immediately apparent in the poised way she seems to move through the studio beside me, and she often commissions dance performances to accompany her exhibitions. A new one will take place at the opening of her new show, building on the ongoing story she has constructed of a doomed love between a moth and a spider. Rooney seems an unflinchingly serious artist. She is uninterested in self-promotion, although her work is critically acclaimed and has found both commercial and institutional support. 'The pursuit of art is a serious calling,' she says. 'If you don't care about it really fucking intensely, why should anybody else?' As she tells me about the relentlessness of her practice, it's clear that this isn't just something she says. 'You just have to sacrifice all the other things you wanted to do with your life,' she says. 'Painting is too demanding.' Rooney's attitude is refreshing amid an overly online culture that seems obsessed with easily digestible content and a quick laugh. Her paintings are beautiful (a word she doesn't shy away from) but also substantive. 'Beautiful is intellectual,' she tells me, recognising the complexity of humanity's capacity to create and seek it. 'The fight of producing culture isn't something to be taken lightly.' Surveying one of her paintings carefully, she nods and says quietly, almost to herself: 'I think that's a good painting.' Megan Rooney: Yellow Yellow Blue is at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London, from 12 June to 2 August
