Studio Organizers

Black page books hold clippings and scraps, sometimes arranged in collages, for visual stimulus and some are from travel and events like museum shows, Calder in San Francisco, Magritte in LA, Van Gogh in Amsterdam. Where I keep the things I will never wear, like outrageous apple green satin Jimmy Choo heels with tomato red undersoles.



These binders are filled with plastic sleeves that hold original art, reduced copies of larger pieces, collages, sketches and collages unfinished, letters, stories.


Pocketsize photo albums are handy for organizing reduced copies of sketches that can be made up into small booklets for trips, places and people, floral, still life, etc. The views of Hokusai will fill one of these booklets. The drawers next to the chest hold pens, paints, supplies. Both came from Ross. Easier for me to keep art things in pieces that look like furniture.

Drawing Room

My drawing space in what used to be a balcony until it grew up to be a room. The accordian moleskine begun in Monterey. My back is to the wall and the desk faces west into the room.


Open space and nothing to distract my vision while I work. Minimal tools, micron pen, dip pen, sumi ink, Winsor Newton paintbox. I use the computer keyboard pullout table to store a paint tray, ruler. The little curve shaped papers are to mask areas while painting. A mechanical pencil so I don't have to bother sharpening and grey kneaded eraser, no crumbs and doesn't pull up paper fibers. Lower left corner shows the toe of my minnitonka mocassins, my personal choice for sketching footwear at home.


Working on Hokusai's view 21 of Mt. Fuji. I use the black book as an album for all the bits and pieces collected. General Patton invading Normandy, Lucy and Ethel, geisha and Godzilla leads to Hokusai prints of the floating world. The black book serves as my morgue, a term one of my design teachers used for his collection of reference images for sketching. He kept his in a filing cabinet but it never worked for me. Not as user friendly as my little book which also is fun for small collages.