Studio art

Friday, June 29, 2007
BY JENNIFER WEISS
Star-Ledger Staff

When sunlight pours through the 8-foot-tall windows at Maggie Ens's apartment, it illuminates a space that looks like a work of art.

Which fits, because Ens is an artist. Her bread and butter are large installations, textiles, jewelry and sculpture. Her living space, a 1,000-square-foot apartment in the building of lofts at 2 Union Street, in Jersey City's Greenville neighborhood, is one of her many canvases.

It's impossible to lump artists together -- some are prone to creative slobbishness, others treat their homes and studios as extensions of their artistic vision and still others do both. But a peek inside a half- dozen artists' homes in Jersey City showed that many of them decorate with what is unmistakably an artist's touch.

Ens and her boyfriend, Marc Sloan, an electro-acoustic musician and composer, moved to the Union Street apartment in January. Their previous place, an apartment in the artists' complex both located at and known as 111 First Street, was larger. The artists at 111 First Street were forced to leave to make room for redevelopment; the award-winning architect Rem Koolhaas has proposed building a mixed-use tower on the site.

While it's clear Ens misses her old place, she has turned the new one into a colorful, boho-chic home and studio, one that is artfully or namented with colorful works and works-in-progress.

To better utilize space in the new, smaller apartment, which started its life as a studio with 12-foot ceilings, Ens and Sloan built two lofts: One for sleeping, one for storage. The sleep loft extends over the kitchen area, mak ing the eat-in kitchen more inti mate. The storage loft divides a closet space that was once too tall for its own good into two separate closets; Ens and Sloan use the bottom for clothing and shelving and the top for books and miscellany.

Beyond the lofts, Ens and Sloan created other "rooms," using the wooden frame of a futon to separate the kitchen area from a workspace reserved for Sloan and a bamboo divider to create a hallway-type space by the entrance.

The bamboo divider was a casualty of someone else's move; Ens found it outside 111 First Street. It is one of many recycled finds in the apartment -- in her art and her home decor, Ens frequently works with found objects, a.k.a. other people's trash.

"I'm such a dumpster-diver type person," she said on a recent Saturday, standing in the apart ment with her pug, Max, in her arms. "I'm always looking for good stuff."

Calm and warm with freckled cheeks and deep dimples, Ens wore a thick and colorful woven necklace she'd made herself along with dangly homemade earrings (two on one side, one on the other.)

The art in the apartment includes Ens's wood-and-plexiglass encased arrangements of found ob jects, which she calls "shadow boxes"; a plant stand Ens made from scraps of plywood and pine, which she painted and embellished with rubber from an old inner tube; and a wooden sculpture of a dino saur that looks to be emerging from a wall in the bathroom. Even ordinary packing crates, used for storage around the apartment, were made more interesting -- Ens drilled holes in one and bound it with a layer of small toys, using waste computer and telephone wire.

"The trouble is, I never say no," said Ens. "When people say to me, 'Do you want such-and-such?' I say, 'yeah.' "

How does she decide what gets displayed? "It has to be stuff that I can live with, and it has to be something that allows me to make more work," said Ens, who exhibits and sells her art and also works as a teacher. Sometimes, "It's a test," she said. "If I can live with it, hopefully someone else can live with it too."

One of the most eye-catching art objects in the apartment is "Echo," a 10-foot by 12-foot sculpture made of fabric, artificial ivy, translucent ribbons of cut-up water bottles and objects like small children's toys and wrapped with orange, purple and white novelty lights.

It sits to the left of Ens's workspace, which is really a small living room-like area bound by a futon that's oriented toward the windows. The futon is where Ens sits when she weaves and sews. There is very little in the apartment to separate workspace from livespace -- instead, the whole space is fluid.

SANDRA DESANDO, a 60-year-old artist and curator in Ens's building, has a loft apartment with a similar layout. Without a dividing line between living and working areas, the clutter that builds up cyclically, depending on what DeSando is working on, sort of spreads all over. "After a while, this place will be all filled with torn paper, pencil shreds, and little bits of crap," DeSando said, "until the clutter gets so bad" that she has to clean it up, sending the works she's finished to shows or storage.

DeSando, who sat on a couch in the middle of the apartment, across from a few in-progress portraits on the wall, said she rotates the pieces she has on display in her apartment. "I get very nudgy about having things around," she said.

One piece she hasn't gotten "nudgy" about is a mixed-media work by Denise Wallner, another local artist, which DeSando hung in front of a row of tall windows. De Sando's windows are draped with queen-sized white sheets, which serve to block heat and make the sunlight entering the room more gauzy, so having Wallner's piece -- a window with a translucent blue paper pane, real tree branch and handful of roosting plaster birds -- creates something of an optical illusion in the space. "That stays up," DeSando says of the piece. "It hasn't bothered me at all."

Across town, in Paul Sullivan and Barbara Landes's apartment, there are two distinct spaces for working and living. Sullivan, a sculptor, and Landes, a printmaker, are also former residents of 111 First Street; now, they live above a nail salon in downtown Jersey City, two blocks from the Grove Street Path Station.

On one side of the apartment is the couple's 500-square-foot living area, which includes a lofted sleeping area, desk with computer and small, open kitchen. On the other side is the 1,000-square-foot workspace/studio, which is filled with Sullivan's tools and Landes's printing press. The two zones are separated by a door.

"It really feels, when you walk through that door, that it's time to work," Sullivan said as he stood in the "work" realm of the apartment. In the living area, "We eat back there, watch a DVD back there, check e-mail, she knits. But when we're here, the only thing we do is work."

In the workspace, Sullivan displays his functional creations, which include a wine rack made from the blade of an exhaust fan and several height-adjustable "lean stools," raised seats people can lean back on while working or reading.

Landes keeps on the wall prints she's made that she likes, so she can use them for inspiration and remember what she has worked on recently.

She also will put up "mistakes that look cool" -- once, Sullivan dropped hot glue into chunks of foam and got a result that he wasn't expecting; Landes appropriated the foam scraps, dipped them in paint and used them as stamps. "Sometimes, accidents can be exciting like that," said Landes, who is five feet tall with pixy-cut hair, in contrast to Sullivan, who is 6-foot-4 with a graying ponytail.

In the living space, a desk and magazine rack are among the pieces of furniture made by Sulli van. "Luckily, he invents things that he actually needs," Landes said, grinning.

Pieces of art in the studio are changed more frequently than works in the living space, Sullivan said. "The stuff in the studio is ever-changing," he said. "It's part of the whole working process." Art in the livespace, on the other hand, "is our domestic art," some of which was made by friends.

While he displays art and hangs it on the walls, Sullivan is averse to characterizing it as "decoration." "We don't like the word 'decoration," he said. "The draperies are decoration. The art is artistic."

Some artists are averse to hanging or displaying art in their homes, period -- especially when that art is their own. Hiroshi Kumagai, a Tokyo-born painter and sculptor, rents an apartment in downtown Jersey City and works out of his building's 250-square-foot garage.

The garage studio is full of paintings of Kumagai's, both finished and unfinished, but his apart ment one flight of stairs up is all white, bare walls. "It's not something I want to decorate with," Ku magai said of his art. "It's not orna mental. The process itself is more important to me. Once it's done, I'm done with it somewhat. I don't care to see it.

"Yeah," he added with a shrug and a smile. "My roommates al ways ask me to put something on the wall."