Creating an art studio in your home

BY DAN VAN BENTHUYSEN | Special to Newsday

May 8, 2008

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

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 ... ."

Her studio provides space for paintings as large as 5 by 7 feet. "Actually I've done larger, but then I have to take the canvas off the stretchers to get it out the door."

John Fink, a founding member of the Nassau Community College art department, where he continues as a professor emeritus, found his current home on Main Street in Northport in 1976 with a carriage house being used as a garage. Built in 1905, the two-story, 800-square-foot carriage house also served at one time as an office for the pastor of a nearby Methodist church.

"I saw this property in the dark with a flashlight when it was for sale and I committed to it with a down payment that night before my wife, Leah, had even seen it," Fink says.

The second floor of the building primarily serves as storage and the ground floor is Fink's work area. A shed elsewhere on his property houses three kilns. His yard is a garden that incorporates sculpture and ceramics into walls, gates and free-standing statues.

A Lake Success quilter

Linda Abrams, a native of South Africa, immigrated to the United States in 1979 after studying fine arts in Cape Town. She and her husband, Archie, also from South Africa, made their home in Lake Success. Ten years ago, she shifted from sculpture and jewelry-making to quilting.

Abrams is no stranger to adapting domestic spaces. Elsewhere in the house she has a home office from which she runs her travel business, Linda's Artistic Adventures, which specializes in exotic trips.

For her quilting, what had originally been a garage became her studio, room enough for two sewing machines, a large table and plenty of works in progress. Perhaps because of her background in sculpture, she finds the low-relief quality of quilting appealing.

Husband-and-wife artists Richard Vaux and Sandra Benny were able to incorporate studios into a home they designed and built "on the cheapest piece of land we could find in Lloyd Neck," says Vaux.

That was in 1983.

Vaux is a professor emeritus at Adelphi University and Benny retired as professor of art at C.W. Post last fall.

In 1981 Vaux sold a large number of paintings to the architectural firm that was building and decorating executive offices and living quarters for Aramco in the Middle East. "That, plus some more money we were able to scrape together, bought this thornbush-filled piece of property in Lloyd Neck." It would be two more years before they could begin to build their home.

"We had an architect draw up the design and we traded art for his plans," Vaux explains. The resulting home is a 2,000-square-foot residence that Vaux and Benny admit is two-thirds studio space and one-third living space.

On the lower level, sliding glass doors look southward down the hillside to Lloyd Harbor. It is in this space that Vaux creates panoramic cloudscapes and landscapes in a style that bridges the worlds of the real and the abstract. At one end of the lower level is a showroom for the couple's art.

On the floor above, a deck wraps around two sides of the house, looking to the north and east across the open fields of Caumsett State Historic Park. Inside on the main floor is a studio Benny uses to create her large-scale vibrant and detailed colored pencil renderings of feathers collected from around the world.

The main floor also includes a kitchen, a dining room, a living room, a bedroom and a bathroom, all decorated with art that Vaux and Benny have collected or created themselves.

On the top floor, a 400-square-foot space that was once a bedroom for their son is now another showroom for the couple's framed art.

"We had to modify the plans a number of times before we began building. Every time we'd dream up a curve or something tricky, the contractor would explain how much more expensive it was going to be and we'd scale back," Vaux explains.

"It took us seven to eight years to finish it all. But we probably saved ourselves something in the neighborhood of $100,000 by doing so much of the labor ourselves - everything from tarring the foundation to installing interior doors and molding."

While Vaux and Benny are justifiably proud of their home today, Vaux admits, "We were really very naive about the financing and everything we were getting into. Honestly, if we had any idea what was going to be involved, I'm sure we wouldn't have done it."