I have my studio and home in Southern Columbia county, New York. Even though I have had this property for over 20 years, it was not until 2009 when our daughter went to college that I made it my full time work and living space. My search for an ideal work and living space has been a long time coming.


For the 9 years before 2009, I had a studio at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts on 38th street behind the Port Authority. This building houses more than 80 artists and I loved being part of a community with other artists. What also I loved was my daily walk from Chelsea up 7th or 8th Avenue, passing through trimming fabric and button stores. Since decorative elements and contrast of nature/culture are so important in my work, these walks along the stores were inspiring.

What I now love is the 100 foot walk from the house to the studio. There, in that short walk, I feel I am discovering a mini universe and the laws of nature. Various smells, changing of light, pure sensation, dew drops in amazing spider webs, new growth and decay all inspire my work.  Sometimes I can not resist stopping to pluck some weeds along the way to my studio, and wondering when and who decided these are weeds since up close their beauty is breathtaking.

My favorite spot is a stone patio over-looking a pond and whistling ornamental grasses. Behind that is a vineyard and sunsets over the Catskill mountains. When I sit there for 5-10  minutes, I am already in a different place, recharged and ready.

Over the past few years my public installations have taken me to different countries and fabricators’ studios. I feel I have to constantly adapt to new locations, new spaces. Maybe all that moving around in search of a perfect work and living space has taught me to adapt and adjust.

But when I return home, after visits to other studios, I am happy.

All of the Greenberg-Jordan books are featured in the BROODWORK: It’s About Time exhibit.

When I was a teenager growing up in St. Louis, I loved to read and daydream. My favorite class was English. We talked about books. We wrote poems and stories. After that, it was all downhill, except for lunch. When the noon bell rang, I would stow my books on top of the lockers. My friends could identify my pile because of the papers sticking out every which way and the uneven stack of books ready to tumble down. My room at home wasn’t much better. Clothes lying in heaps, wastebasket overflowing, movie magazines, photos of Rock Hudson and Tab Hunter, and novels piled on the desk. It wasn’t until after I was married and had children that I became a neatness freak. If you come to my house now, you’ll notice that both the art and the décor are fairly minimalist. The first and second floors are all orderly and carefully arranged much like in our living room, below.

Here is the ideal study to go with the aesthetic of my house – spare, and pristine, paperless and modern.

Unfortunately, this room belongs to a friend of mine, in an apartment with a view of the famous Saarinen Arch. But I’m a writer of non-fiction. I need my reference books, computer, notes, etc. within reach. Her stylish, tasteful study just might intimidate and would definitely inhibit the flow of creative juices.

My house was built in 1910 and looks like a cross between Wuthering Heights and the Bastille. Here is the ideal study to go with my Gothic Revival house.

Notice the built in bookshelves, the paneling, and the elegant chandelier. The fireplace almost makes the room look cozy. This isn’t my study either. It is in the Morgan Library in New York, the former home of the banker, J.P., himself. J.P.’s taste was refined and worldly, befitting a turn of the century tycoon.

But now…my real study, where the ghost of that messy teenager still remains. My study is tucked away on the third floor of my old house. No one ever comes up here to bother me. My husband texts me, wondering when I’m coming to bed. I sit at the computer looking out at the expanse of green lawn lined with towering old oaks and maples. The flowering pears and cherry trees are in full bloom now that it’s spring.

On the long desk in no particular order are writing projects in process: a mystery I’ve been fiddling with for four years, notes for magazine articles, and reference books and an outline for a new children’s book I’m researching. I don’t understand how some people can keep everything on a computer and have a paperless study. There are notes to myself stuck all over the desk, bills in a cubby hole, correspondence in another, invitations, and concert tickets in a special file next to…well…other special files. There are photos of my family on the mantle, along with my collection of green matte American pottery.

Photos tacked on my bulletin board of me with some of the people I’ve written about, including Chuck Close, Frank Gehry, Richard Serra, and Ellsworth Kelly. There are also pictures of my grandchildren, close friends, and my standard brown poodles Henri and Thiebaud. A charming letter my mother, who was in the advertising business, wrote to a colleague in the 50’s and award certificates for some of my books are framed and propped on a shelf.

If you come to my study, you’ll see my whole life spread before you. I cannot imagine working anywhere else.

My business isn’t just about food.  It is about community.  What I do is provide a nutritious environment for my friends and family that supports everyone, myself included.

It is my belief that life is a bounty.  It is incredible to have a store, this incredibly sustaining place, to share my days with people.  We are thankful to share joy, sadness, connectedness, laughter, life’s milestones.  My family comes and goes throughout the day.  My husband is there by my side.  My three-year-old son, a once preemie baby who inspired me to break out, my strong boy now, laughing and swiping a cookie.  My nine-year-old daughter, a strong swimmer, diving through her studies and doing her homework at my office desk.  My eleven-year-old daughter, bringing her girlfriends in and proudly sharing the bounty.  This is my ideal life.

My children get to see work and to learn the process of work.  When our fathers went to work, they went away, we had no idea what they did or where they went.  My kids get to learn about sweaty, boiling pots hard work, but also how fun it is, and they get to do it right along with us.  I tell them that no one can take the hard worker away from you.  Work is no problem when you have this balance of being able to write your own parameters and follow your own creative whims.

My ideal life work space?  This one, with all its highs and lows.  Tired legs and full bellies.  Bring it on.

Little Flower Herb Scones

Ingredients:

AP Flour                                             3 3/4 cups

Baking Powder                                    2 Tbs

Salt                                                      1 Tbs

Salted butter, cold, cut in pieces 12 oz. (3 cubes)

Eggs                                                    4 each

Heavy Cream                                       3/4 cup + 2 Tbs

Buttermilk                                           1/4 cup

Herbs:

Tarragon, chopped                               1 packed cup

Chervil, chopped                                 1 packed cup

Chive, chopped                                    1 packed cup

Flat leaf parsley, chopped                    1 packed cup

Method:

Sift dry ingredients together and place in bowl of large mixer fitted with paddle. Cut in butter. Let mix for 2 minutes on speed 1. Add all herbs and mix until incorporated. Slowly add eggs and cream. Mix until incorporated. Roll out onto lightly floured surface, 1” thick. Cut with plain 3” round cutter and place on lined sheet pan. Yields 15 scones. Brush with buttermilk.Bake at 325F until golden. Approximately 15-20 minutes.

Citrus Pomegranate Compote

Citrus compote:

Orange                                                  1

Lemon                                                   2

Lime                                                      1

Water                                                    1 cup

Sugar                                                     1 generous cup

Pomegranate seeds                                to taste

Thinly slice citrus peel and all. Remove seeds. Place in pot with water. Bring to boil and then turn down heat to simmer. When compote consistency is reached, add sugar. Cook briefly until syrup thickens but take off heat before citrus gets candied. Add pomegranate seeds to taste.

Juliette: The perfect working space is made entirely out of layered sheets of paper: cottony, soft-like-skin paper. In a giant block note, any unsuccessful design attempt is forbidden: trace on the walls, draft, carve the wrong marks and repent: tear the sheets. No one will ever know what went through your mind. Write on the tables, the corridors, the floors, the bed, whenever the promise of an idea arises.

Good pieces are harvested, bad ones systematically shredded and randomly re-pasted in beautiful Ellsworth-Kelly-like, “arranged by chance” collages. Nothing to lose, just recycle; and in the morning, one could start fresh, on blank surfaces.

But here it creeps already: the fear of the blank page. The paralysis caused by an infinite amount of possibilities…I have to rethink this pristine fantasy before I cannot think at all. And as I look around at the desk onto which I am writing — on a minuscule piece of paper — it seems pretty clear that I do not have much control over space after all… My desk has won, a long time ago. The stratification, the piles, the clusters, the collections, the archives, the rejects, the relics, the treasures, the samples, the samplers: everything that has helped me think is right there and seems to be going nowhere.

I clean, I push, throw away, relocate and compile, but somehow, the desk seems on a mission to never clear up. As confusing and ambiguous this abundance might look, its message to me is actually crystal clear: “However testing today’s task will be, I remain the living proof that work gets done on this table. Look, it has been done before, you can do it today.” Every morning, I seem to believe it.

As years pass by it seems that work and life become more and more intertwined. With children now, work time is limited by tighter schedule constraints but also tends to be fueled by more personal/family interests. I still like to keep professional and family activities separated but it happens quite frequently that a child’s nap becomes an opportunity to wrap up an assignment. Before long, tools become toys, books become dinosaurs’ houses, and layouts become coloring books. The partition between home and office disappears and everyone is working/playing. From that view point, I have enormous expectations for my family and professional lives to come. It will have to continue to get better and better by becoming more and more fulfilling, joyous, convivial and creative for all of us. Nothing less and for that, I might need some help.

The office must become very supportive. It starts knowing me better and constantly reminds me of what inspires and interests me. “Let’s not re-invent the wheel, Juliette,” I hear it say, “here are the designers and artists that have most quickened your heartbeat lately; first, clean up your eyes with their amazing work.” Then, in the anguish of the design process, the desk whispers: “Listen, I generated constructive criticism based on what the people you admire the most in your field and family would say about your work at this minute.” A button on my keyboard automatically generates questions. Interrogations like “Could you erase fifty percent? How does this relate to today’s news? Could it be a comment on our food system? Can you make this by hand?” would fire at me along with much needed clear directives: “Hide the best parts. Color-code it all. Try one hundred more. Crop it like Sister Corita would. Make it for someone extremely curious…”

Sensing my adrenaline level go dangerously high, the speakers channel my Nick Drake radio on Pandora. In extreme cases, the desk prepares a quick slide show of unrelated material and mandates it to be incorporated in the work. My thoughts are evaluated at every moment, sorting out the distraction and the analysis. And when the balance materializes, all the time gained, recorded on a little counter, is used to draw on cottony, soft-like-skin sheets of paper.

Obviously, I am not asking for much; just a little bit of balance, once in a while, something good I made to show my family and a few minutes here and there to draw.

“What is my ideal live/work space? It is a well-designed space in which living with the profound is a given. It isn’t an easy thing to accomplish.  This year the world lost the amazing Jane Blaffer Owen, who reincarnated a near ghost town in New Harmony, Indiana into the glorious spiritual retreat it is today.  It took her an entire lifetime of dedicated work, and the process continues.

She involved Philip Johnson, Richard Meier, Jacques Lipchitz, and many other creatives in designing an ideal space to think and to create.

And to love.  It was on a trip to New Harmony that my then boyfriend and I realized we ought to move in together (in a few months we celebrate 22 years together).  Therefore, I’m tremendously honored to be among the artists whose works she chose to populate the complex. I could go on and on about this place and if you haven’t been there, then find a way to make the trip.

What Owen created was a rare place where there was enough breathing space to imagine possibilities.

I’d like that in my ideal live/work space, too.

Imagining possibilities requires the ability to be positive.  Positiveness requires the ability to laugh.  “Dying is easy but comedy is hard,” actor Edmund Gwenn is credited as famously saying.  Similarly, artistic creations which make one laugh or smile or believe are ideal to me. So there needs to be both a physical space that is ideal and a mental one.  Of course they are intertwined.  Following on the conversation begun by Alain de Botton last week—YES, YES, YES how we live in architecture most certainly affects one’s day to day life.  The exploration of this is a significant component to my own sculptural work.  Exploring the experience of the individual-be it works that are large meanderable installations or individual works designed for specific homes-allows for a wide range of play.  There would be a lot of play in my ideal live/work space so that one can pretend to be a very small insect in a paper forest, or the king of the forest.

Speaking of playing at being king of the forest, BROODWORK participant Juliette Bellocq (who will share her views in this space in two weeks) asked me what it would be like to live in one of my sculptures.  She could mean this:

or this

But she got me thinking about the larger possibilities. This would be fun to live amidst.

However, I think it would be ideal to do this:

And as long as I had a place to make a pie, I think my family will happily join me in our special squiggly house.