Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Settling In

We're adjusting to life in Austin pretty well so far. The toughest thing is the heat but I'm proud of myself for dealing with it as well as I have been. Mainly, I'm planning on not being embarrassed about sweating anymore. It made it up to 106ยบ again today.

I've spent the last few days tooling around the city trying to find a new studio. My friend from Skidmore, Mike Merritt, has been living in for Austin about 12 years and lives on the East Side of town. I drove around with him the other day looking at the neighborhoods and brainstorming about studios. We even stopped by fellow potter, Ryan McKerley's studio. Ryan rebuilt his kiln recently and had a studio full of work that he was getting ready to fire. He shares a studio space with jewelry artist Lisa Crowder, whose work we had carried at our gallery. It was nice to catch up and see what's going on in town here.

I looked at a couple of spaces yesterday and today. My dilemma is, do I want a space close or within a retail area or a space a little further away and one that will be purely a studio space? Obviously, there's a price difference between those 2 ideas. The benefit would also be the ability to sell pots out of the shop, something that I'm very used to.

Right now I'm leaning towards leasing a place a little further out. It's a new space in a brand new live/work development in East Austin. It's a little further out from downtown but nothing is too far in this small city.

I'm going to look at a few more places but hopefully I'll have a studio soon.

Here's where the new studio might be...


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4 comments:

Sister Creek Potter said...

Welcome to Texas. You are being very brave about the 106 weather--it will get better soon! Good you did not arrive in June when the 100+ weather began and never let up! Austin is a 'small city' but the traffic is awful--take that into consideration, too. Happy landing.

brandon phillips said...

welcome home.

Ron said...

Glad to hear you are doing well. Good luck with the studio search.

abigail said...

screw that. go to law school.