The Studio, By Sara Gilbert

Ted Goerschner and Marilyn Simandle shared a studio for just about a year. The couple designed it together, turning what had been the garage of their Santa Ynez, California, home into a roughly 600-square-foot studio with skylights in the vaulted cathedral ceiling, big windows, and hemlock pine flooring. They hung track lighting across both sides of the room and built a shelf around the wall on which to display their paintings.

Then they found out they couldn’t paint together. There was Simandle’s addiction to talk radio and Goerschner’s preference for classical music. There was the distraction of canvases being stretched and stapled while one of them was trying to paint. And there was the problem of cramped quarters, tight even for a happy husband and wife. “We needed more room,” Goerschner says. “The space just wasn’t conducive to two working artists.”

So they built another studio, almost an exact replica of the first. Now Simandle works there, separated by French doors from her husband in the original space. Both spaces have their own entrances, their own phone lines, and their own sound systems. But Simandle’s is the only one with a bathroom. “Ted has to come to my studio to go to the bathroom,” she says. “But other than that, we’re pretty much separate.”

Goerschner’s easel is bathed in natural light that pours in from the large crescent-shaped window on the north side of the studio, just over his right shoulder. Although he also has track lighting overhead, he relies on the windows to illuminate his work. “I’d much rather paint by natural light,” he says. “And, even on bad days, I get enough north light to paint by. It’s pretty much a constant light.”

Goerschner starts his day by standing in that light and applying paint to his canvas. He often works on large canvases and paints with loose, open brushstrokes. The best way to accomplish that is by standing. “I need to stand to get a better perspective,” he says. “So much of my work is very loose and impressionistic, and I have to be able to step back and see if it works. I walk back and forth a lot while I’m painting.”

Goerschner likes everything else in his studio to be as mobile as he is. So much of the furniture, from his easel to his palette, is on wheels. Most often, however, the palette- an antique porcelain Hoosier table he’s been using since he found it in Vermont in 1962- is off to his right while he paints. After four decades of use, it looks, he says, “like the Grand Canyon,” with paint piled up in colorful ridges all across the surface. He stores the paints and other supplies he needs for each painting in drawers underneath the palette. The rest are organized in a storage closet adjacent to the studios.

“It’s really just a functioning, working studio,” Goerschner says. “I’ve been painting for 40 years now and, over the years, I’ve been able to work out the kinks in the system. So what I have now is really very functional.”

Memories of those 40 years are displayed on the back wall, behind his easel. There’s a photograph of his favorite old yellow Lab. There’s an old palette, still crusty with colors. There’s a picture of Goerschner with astronaut and artist Alan  Bean,  who attended one of his classes in Atlanta, Georgia, “I’ve got all kinds of stuff back there,” Goerschner says. “Silly stuff from my students, a funny cartoon from a political cartoonist, some awards I’ve won, that kind of thing.”

There’s a wonderfully worn brown leather easy chair positioned just in front of the “memory wall.” That’s where Goerschner sits when he needs a break, right next to the cast iron wood stove. Simandle has a pot-bellied stove on her side, as well. Although they put a heater in the building when they added onto it, they both like to light a rife occasionally.

“It is nice ambiance, when you get a crackling fire going,” Goerschner says. “So we always keep a cord of wood out in the shed, for fires and just in case we lose power, which does happen here in California from time to time.”

Although Goerschner grew up on the East Coast, he’s come to enjoy California’s sunny climate. From his studio, he can see the swimming pool and patio that were part of the package when they purchased the home in 1988. On warm days, he occasionally takes a late afternoon break to soak up some sun for an hour or so. But taking a dip rarely tempts him. “I’d just as soon have a putting green there than a pool,” he says with a laugh.

More tempting, Goerschner admits, is the opportunity to pop into his wife’s studio and offer up a witty word or two. “I’m a clown,” he says. “I like to stick my head in the door and say something funny every once in a while.”

Simandle doesn’t mind occasional interruptions from her husband. She’s gotten used to his visits. But, when she’s got a lot of work to finish, as is often the case, she’ll intentionally leave her phone in the house, about 10 feet away from the studio. “It’s all about not being distracted,” she says.

So, when Simandle settles in at her easel – like her husband, she usually works standing up – she prefers to keep interruptions to a minimum. She tunes her Bose Wave radio to her favorite talk show – “I can tune it out,” she says. “I don’t really listen, but I like to have it on” – and boots up the computer adjacent to her easel. There, on the 42-inch plasma screen, she plays a slideshow of all the reference photos she’s using that day.

 “I upload my photos from my digital camera onto my plasma screen,” Simandle says. “For each painting, I probably use seven or eight pictures. I have the slideshow playing, because I’m just using them as reference. I never paint things exactly the way I see them. Nature never has perfect design. So my design is at the expense of the truth. I want it to be better than it actually looks.”

Painting, she admits, takes up only about one-fifth of her spacious studio. Her easel is positioned at the back of the room. To its right is her palette on a wheeled table that also holds a coffee can filled with mineral spirits and her paints. Her plasma screen is on the left. The rest of the room is what Simandle calls “move-around space.”

“I’ve got all my books, my frames, my canvases, plus, my paintings,” she says. “If I’m getting ready for a show, I might have to horde almost 30 paintings.”

Even when she’s storing paintings for an upcoming show, none get placed on the mini-grand piano in her studio. “I try to keep things off it,” Simandle says. “It’s pretty much sacred space. Sometimes I’ll put a cloth on it and set up a little still life, but otherwise I don’t put anything on it.”

Sitting down to play a tune or two gives Simandle a quick break from painting. “I don’t play nearly as much as I should,” she admits. But the piano definitely gets more of a workout than the sewing machine, which is also set up in the studio. “That doesn’t get any use,” she concedes. “The piano gets occasional use, and the easel gets a lot of use, but not the sewing machine.”

Both Simandle and Goerschner are grateful for the space they call their own. But they’d both admit that now they’d like even more of it. “It’s really the perfect studio,” Goerschner says, “but if anything, I’d like it even bigger. That would be my advice to other artists: When you build a studio, if you have a size in mind that you want, double it. It’ll be the perfect size in about two years.”