Welcome to My New Studio!

What my creative spaces taught me about making art — and about myself.

When I was little, I grew up in lots of different houses — none of them were mine. My bedrooms were temporary places in rented rooms on scattered continents, and the only consistent feature was a stack of books.

One of my favorites was Hans and Peter, the story of two boys who yearn for a place of their own. Hans lives in a shabby apartment that looks out onto sooty rooftops, while Peter is in a basement — all he ever sees out his bedroom window are people’s shoes passing by.

Hans & Peter

One day, they discover an abandoned shack in a scruffy, empty lot, and they decide to make it theirs. The book tells the story of them cleaning out the little shack, painting the walls, reclaiming trashed furniture, and planting flowers in the window boxes. It becomes their own private clubhouse.

This book appealed to several of my fantasies — a tidying project, a cozy home, a good friend. It disappeared in one of our many moves, but years later, I acquired a copy on eBay. On rainy days, I sit on the floor and leaf through it, back in that little shack with its homemade curtains and windowboxes.

A few months later, something happened that made me think that dream might actually come true.

I was nine years old and was sent to live with my grandparents in Pakistan. Before I left Australia, I got a small toolkit — a saw, a hammer, a screwdriver, a drill, screws, and nails — and my grandmother promised me a patch of her garden that I could call my own. I imagined building a wee shed with tidy window boxes, a space for my tools, and pots of germinating petunias.

Me in my mispelled garden

But when Ninny showed me my “plot,” it turned out to just be one end of a flower bed, already planted with snapdragons. There was no room for the homesteading I’d imagined. The plot sickened.

When I was in college, I had a scheme to start a magazine to publish the best of the papers my brilliant fellow students worked long and hard on. Papers full of interesting ideas but written for a single audience — their professor — and destined to end up in a desk drawer or a trash can. I wanted to give those ideas a place to live beyond the classroom, a home where they could be seen and appreciated widely. This was long before the internet, before blogs or easy ways to share our creations.

My friends and I planned to edit, design, print, and distribute this glossy new journal. But first, we needed an office. The student government controlled a few small rooms reserved for clubs, so I began lobbying for one of them. I filled out forms, attended meetings, brownosed, and imagined myself behind a desk, running my own publication, like the Paris Review or Daedalus, only more intellectual.

Would-be publisher

By the time I was assigned an office, I’d lost all interest in making some stodgy magazine full of recycled sophomoric pedantry. I sat alone at a metal desk in the empty room, admitting I’d really done all this work just to get this space.

A week later, I sheepishly returned the key.

After college, I rented my first apartment and built nearly everything in it — a couch, a loft bed, storage units. Every night after work, I sawed and hammered late into the night.

In my next apartment, my roommates and I spent two years renovating, only to have the landlord call our efforts “substandard” and threaten to sue us for all our hard work.

It didn’t matter. I’d already had my fun. The making was enough.

Cube to Exec

During all my years in advertising, I had many offices that never felt like they were mine. I’d gripe about the furniture or lighting, but never considered actually buying a chair or a lamp I might like better.

Here’s a short film about going to work.

I loved the apartment I shared with my wife and son, but beyond a couple of drawers and shelves, I didn’t have a true workspace, let alone a proper studio or man cave. For most of my adult life, there wasn’t a single special place that belonged just to me.

New York Living

When I was 53, we moved to Los Angeles, and JJ suggested I take over the little one-car garage. I jumped up and rushed to IKEA, bought desks and lamps and storage bins, and turned the drafty old place into a painting and writing studio — with dog beds. I’d sit there for hours, barefoot and paint-speckled, amazed that it was finally mine, all mine.

LA Studio

When we came here to Phoenix, I took over a spare bedroom and made it into my lair — the one you’ve probably seen in my videos. I’d once dreamed of building a separate building for a studio, but I realized all I needed was a table, a few carts, and a quiet corner. This little room has been perfect.

Here’s a video tour of my current studio:

I’ve built other kinds of rooms, too — digital ones. I’ve set up websites, Facebook pages, WordPress blogs, YouTube channels, and Kajabi classrooms. I rearranged layouts, changed colors, and shifted pixels. This nest-making scratched the same old itch as Hans and Peter — to make a place my own, even if it only existed as code on a distant server.

Over time, though, I’ve learned that the space itself doesn’t make the work.

I make do. I’ve written books on the little fold-down tables on planes to Japan, I’ve sketched on placemats, and drawn in tiny sketchbooks balanced on my knees while sitting on the sidewalks of Rome and Paris. What really matters is being comfortable in my own creativity, feeling at home within myself.

The quest for the perfect studio, the perfect atmosphere, the perfect sketchbook — those are just forms of procrastination. They can get in the way of making things, not making them easier.

This month, I’ve moved again, and I still can’t help tweaking.

Welcome to my latest place — here, on Substack. I’ve spent the past few weeks moving furniture, transferring essays, fussing over details no one else will ever notice.

Look around. Pull up a chair. Smell the window boxes.

I hope it’ll feel like home to you, too.

Your pal,

Danny

How does your space affect your creativity? Let me know in the comment section.

P.S. In addition to my weekly essays, I post daily on the Notes section of Substack. Short posts on stuff I’m making and thinking about. Make sure you check it out.

P.P.S.The essay I wrote last week generated an awful lot of feedback — in no small part due to a mortifying typo. I apologize to all the crocheters who got unnecessarily excited by the title. It should, of course, have been titled ‘Crotchety,’ not ‘Crochety.’

P.P.P.S. The Early Bird sale on my new courses, Quick Draw, ends tonight. I’m sure you don't want to miss it. Click here to learn more.