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Creating an art studio in your home

Jewelry artist Alice Sprintzen converted a breakfast nook into a studio in her Syosset home. (Newsday / Karen Wiles Stabile / May 7, 2008)

BY DAN VAN BENTHUYSEN | Special to Newsday

May 8, 2008

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In the room next to the kitchen in her Syosset home, retired high school art teacher Alice Sprintzen keeps an acetylene torch.

She also keeps a drill press, a scroll saw, a flexible shaft, a belt sander and a rolling mill, as well as a rock-polisher, a bench shear and a small anvil.

A window fan ventilates when the torch is going.

Sprintzen is a jeweler, and what was once upon a time a typical suburban breakfast room became her studio 25 years ago when she and her husband, David, took out the wall separating the breakfast room from an adjoining mudroom to enlarge the space to 12 by 11 1/2 feet.

Sprintzen, a 37-year veteran and board member of the Long Island Craft Guild, has done what many yearn to do: She has carved out space in a traditional home to make a rather nontraditional artist's studio.

For many artists, this means dedicating a room or two in the house for disparate and unlikely creative tools ranging from colored pencils to, in Sprintzen's case, that acetylene torch. For others, an art studio means buying a home with a barn, carriage house or garage that can be converted to a studio separate from the home. For a privileged few, the art studio is an integral part of a home they are able to design and build for themselves.

"One reason I gravitated toward jewelry," Sprintzen, 61, says, "was because it doesn't require a huge amount of working space."

She should know: She wrote the book on crafts - actually, three of them for Davis Publications in the 1980s. "I had to try all these crafts I'd never done and they had to be photographed. I was teaching full-time and raising a family. I don't know how I did it."

Red plastic, organized well

She is methodical about organizing her materials. One might call her fastidious - if such a word can be applied to an artist who saves found objects, like the translucent red plastic in discarded automotive taillights. (Sprintzen has found this plastic is particularly durable for jewelry-making. She admits being a scavenger well-known to the staff at a nearby auto body shop.)

Her many supplies and materials, both found and purchased, are categorized in plastic drawers and tubs that occupy space in closets and under work benches. A room on the second floor serves as additional space for warehousing supplies.

"Sometimes it seems that I spend more time organizing than actually working as an artist," she says with a hint of surprise at how her creative work habits have evolved.

Sprintzen's unusually witty and elegant jewelry can be seen in the Hillwood Commons Art Gallery at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University (where her husband, David, is a professor emeritus of philosophy and will retire this August), in a show she shares with artist Robert Dancik of Connecticut. Titled "Material Conversations," the show will be up through Saturday.

Barbara Grossman Karyo is a potter and ceramist with three kilns. "The day I found this house with the barn," she says of her home and studio in Glen Head, "was the day I stopped being a painter and started being a clay artist. It's hard to be a potter when you're renting an apartment in Park Slope."

An easel in the attic

Karyo, who is semiretired and teaches ceramics one day a week at Suffolk Community College, bought her house in 1971. "My easel is still in the attic, although I do still draw a lot." Hers is an 1890 home that had a small gentleman-farmer's barn built about 10 years after the house. Two of her kilns are on the ground floor of the barn and a third was mechanically hoisted to the second floor courtesy of some laborers at work elsewhere in the neighborhood who expressed curiosity as to what the contraption was and found themselves offering to help.

Her 25-by-20-foot barn provides a studio primarily on the second floor, and each corner has evolved for Karyo into a dedicated work space. One corner is for reference books, another corner is for glazing and yet another is for pigments and supplies.

Constance Sloggatt Wolf, 48, an art teacher at Northport High School, found what would become her home and studio 20 years ago with her husband, architect Charles Wolf. The Huntington Victorian dates to "somewhere in the 1880s" and, like Karyo's property, the house came with a small barn (20-by-20 feet) of roughly the same vintage.

"When a tree fell on the barn, we thought we'd replace it with a studio," she says. "But then we discovered it was considered a historic building and we had to restore it. So we popped out windows in the roof on the second floor and that became my studio."

Asked if the couple had in mind to use the barn as a studio when they bought it, she would only say, "Well, one of us did ... ."