Studio 12b - Horsie

My friend, Sampson, built this rocking horse on the left for Danielle when she was a baby. It had been repainted several times. It had some pretty straggley black yarn for a mane and Horsie had fierce un-horsie eyes. Now grown up, with her own baby on the way, Danielle's family commissioned me...

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Studio #12a - The Cottage

The Asian Fusion Collection, installed at Valley Girls Gallery (now the Carmel Valley Art Association) in 2005, and the same little red table in our living room today, under a Melissa Lofton painting of Big Sur and holding stacks of knitted squares about to be sewn into a lap robe. ...

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Studio #12 - The Cottage

  In the 7990 Cottage, the Give Someone You Love the Boot series was born, short-lived because I needed David’s help pouring the three gallons of slip into the gigantic boot mold and pouring the excess out of the mold. The mold came with its own simple design. During the greenware stage, I...

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Studio #12 - The Laundry Room +

We moved into our love nest about three weeks before our first marriage ceremony, dubbed the IRS wedding, on December 31, 2003.  You’ll hear about Wedding Number 2, Valentine’s Day, 2004 elsewhere in the blog. At 7990 I packed most of my studio paraphernalia into the dark and rather gloomy laundry...

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Studio #11 - Above the Market

The studio above Carmel Valley Market: 800 square feet with two big rooms and the only unit in the building with its own bathroom. Others more transient that I lived in a couple of the units: the red-headed, balloon-blowing clown and his wife lived behind their bike shop on the first floor facing...

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Studio #10 - La Mesa

In San Diego, we found a house large enough to handle the entourage, including my son Michael (on the Chopra Center construction team), his five year old daughter, Taylor, two colleagues from Rainbow Ranch who came with me on this cooking adventure, their Dalmatian and two kittens. My my, what a scene. How did I do it? At least our bedrooms were private and pretty quiet, and the recreation room became...

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Seabreeze Organic Farm

Stephenie and the crew of Seabreeze Farm provided the produce during my three years as Executive Chef of the Chopra Center for Well Being in La Jolla. Seabreeze Organic Farm in Solano Beach, the scene of many happy events, parties and opportunities to dig in the dirt with pros. My granddaughter,...

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Studio #9 - The Tipi at Rainbow Ranch

Ah, the tipi: the most romantic of my living spaces, the  simplest of studios. A life-long attraction to Native American lore, life style and spirituality inspired my 400 “square foot” tipi at Rainbow Ranch in Calistoga. That and the 5 x 8 room (next to the kitchen and across from the pantry) they...

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Studio #8 - Who has time for a studio?

The early 90s: fly fishing and camping in summers, skiing and snow play in winter. I stashed the studio in the garage, thinking I was taking some production time off. This only worked for about two weeks. Soon the guest room bed was covered with art materials and the drawing board squeezed into the...

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