Studio Sketch

It turned out to be the best studio I ever had; my fourth one in Vancouver. The large North facing windows only leaked a little in heavy rain. Not once had someone spread shit on the bathroom wall. We never had to sweep rubble off the steps after it rained. It was neither so unbearably hot in summer nor so miserably cold in winter that I couldn’t work, I mean nothing more than a week or two knocked out if the temperature was extreme either way. Usually nothing a little space heater couldn’t handle, as long as it was plugged in the East wall and not the West wall so the breaker wouldn’t go. Recently the breakers had started blowing every afternoon despite our precautions but we fixed this problem by unscrewing a few of the overhead fluorescents. The smell of stale grease coming up from the restaurants below was easily cleared out by cracking the windows and running a small fan. The front door’s hydraulics were shot making it hard to get in and out with an armload of supplies but it was secure. The building was only broken into once while we were there, the thieves hoisting themselves through one of the back windows whose latches had all long ago busted off and never been repaired. The linoleum was crumbling under our feet and the ceiling tiles looked like they might come crashing down onto our heads but it wasn’t like the building would be condemned. The neighbourhood was safe at night, there was food and coffee available nearby and I had a number of friends working in the neighbourhood. And no rats, Sonja reminds me. As a minor bonus, we used to be able to give directions to our studio by describing it as being “around the corner from the adult toy store, just down from Puncturehaus, above the Wet Wizard bookstore.” It was perfect.