Studio #1,🙃🤩😵‍💫⌛️🎨

Studios I’ve Had

If I’d had today’s technology back then, you would be able to see exactly what my first studio looked like. You’d see the paints I had, the friends who modeled for me, and the entire process of making those specific paintings. You might have even gotten a tour of the apartment and seen me at that age. You’d be able to witness the strange things that happened while I lived there, all the drawings I made, and the work I was creating—so different from what I do now. There would be so much to look back on that I don’t have.

But all I have are the memories, and that’s the point. I wish I could see all those other things, but I can’t. So, I’ll tell you the memories I do have from living there.

The first art studio I had was right after I graduated from Harvard, in the summer of 1991. It was on Rue Goethe—like the poet—where my parents had a rental apartment, provided through my dad’s law firm while he was working in Paris. I lived there for the summer until I found a place of my own. The building had a tiny garret at the top, a space meant for the “maid” in old times. It was very small, about the size of what my current studio will be, but in a different shape. I managed to set up an easel, have friends pose as models, and find room for all my oil paints and brushes. It had a skylight window that was slanted as it was in the roof.

The space was sparse, but it felt exciting. It was my first real studio, and I had people posing nude, which made me feel like one of those classic Parisian artists from a different era. I imagined myself as part of that bohemian world of artists and writers who came to Paris to work and spend their days in cafés, reading each other’s books and paintings. Ok, Chat GPT you didn’t get that idea. It reminded me of those times but I didn’t imagine myself as one of those people. Back then I didn’t have a lot of self-esteem, but discovering I was an artist randomly a few years before, I liked the artist I was and the ideas I had.

So, that was my first studio. It feels incredibly romantic to remember, especially when I think about how supportive my parents were of my art back then—just as they still are now, with my work hanging all over their apartment.

What I meant there is a rare privilege that doesn’t just come with them being “patrons” of me as an artist, extremely rare, but also they hung my paintings on their walls everywhere, from the first still life I made at Harvard, of which I do have a photo.

After Paris, I had this grand idea of moving to Czechoslovakia— ( I had the grand idea when leaving Harvard of living in Paris as a stepping stone to moving to what was then Czechoslovakia back when it was still called that—because I’d romanticized it through reading Milan Kundera’s books. I was captivated by the idea of living there.

Here’s what I loved about Teresa and how she reminded me of myself:

“She loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.”

I loved Milan Kundera back then. I knew the book and film The UnbearableLightness of Being inside out. An odd synchronicity is his idea of sharing dictionaries in love people, I’m using it as a phrase to mean people in love who have the start of a history within something already shared. My kid asked if I believe in soul mates. Maybe. Maybe not only one but different kinds. The beginnings of soul mate friendships involve this dictionary concept:

“Misunderstanding is the source of most conflicts in the world. It is a failure to recognize that the meaning of words is not fixed. We all carry with us our own little dictionary of words we have been compiling ever since our early childhood. If we do not have the same dictionary as the person we are talking to, we will never understand them properly.”

Here’s Chat GPT’s on the nose connection:

“Sabina realizes that she and Franz don’t share the same “dictionary,” which symbolizes their incompatible interpretations of love, commitment, and life in general. Their relationship falters because their emotional languages are too different, and they’ve met too late to reconcile these differences.”

She pictured love as a dramatic struggle; he pictured it as a permanent home. The result was that the two of them had two different conceptions of love, and they were both unable to understand the other’s. Therein lay the misunderstandings that brought them pain.

Weird to read those words; probably I’ve been with my soul partner or spouse for so long is that we both probably live the concept of love as both of these things.

So when I met him at a party in SoHo that I almost didn’t go to, I found out his dog had been named Dictionary from the book.

I also might have still been in Czechoslovakia if I’d stayed there for around 7-8 years.

Anyway the book is important in terms of my dreaming of living in a place based on novels I’d read, particularly that one but others like The Book of laughter and Forgetting, which I’ve totally forgotten.