This summer, a friend took a portrait of me at my desk. It's adjacent to the painting table and large tackboard that make up my home studio. The portrait reminded me of something that at first I couldn't place...

Then the image popped into my head: a painting by Matisse called Interior with Etruscan Vase. It's been a favorite of mine for years. I like that the woman is gazing back at the viewer, completely at ease and confident. Her plants, book, and objects in vivid color and shape surrounding her. Discovering this image in my late teenage years was a revelation.

Interior with Etruscan Vase, Henri Matisse, 1940 | The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio

Since then, photographs and paintings of artists and writers in their studios or at their desks always interest me. Seeing all of the little details of the everyday space where creativity takes place. An art teacher I once had referred to Paul Klee as a 'kitchen table artist.' The small scale of his paintings was in direct relation to the space that he had to make them. But it doesn't matter. Seeing a Paul Klee painting in person is just as enthralling as any monumentally-scaled painting or sculpture. The imprint made by a human hand is still a portal that can transport.

There are a handful of images that come to my mind all the time of artists and writers at work: Frida Kahlo, often confined to her bed, painting; Anne Sexton at her typewriter (in a pose similar to Matisse's woman with the Etruscan vase); Sylvia Plath, with her books lined up behind her on shelves or her typewriter precariously perched wherever she was; Wendell Berry in his work overalls with his legs up on his desk looking outside through a wall of windows; Toni Morrison smiling at her desk at Random House; E.B. White on a wooden bench in his simple shack with a window opened to water; Jay DeFeo, who made a painting in her apartment that ended up blocking out most of the light and had to be hoisted out through the window when she completed it.

It might be that the spaces shown in these images are usually so ordinary. Not much is needed to think and start to make something. To get lost in the portal that your own space allows you.

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