By Heather LaPorte
It’s mid-November, and the leaves in Washington, D.C. have just hit their peak. Luke and I try to take in a little of the wonder during long afternoon walks which usually lull him to sleep. We walk down an avenue near our house. It has a wide median filled with mature trees, and it feels like walking through an outdoor room as I push the stroller down the sidewalk. The canopy above us is yellow, almost translucent, and as light comes through the leaves, it is more like walking in the sunshine than in the shade of trees.
During our walk, I’m at work. I pick colors out of the landscape—the burnished red of a leaf on the sidewalk or the muddy blue of a distant stand of trees—and I calculate how to mix the colors that I see. I consider what pigments of paint it would take to create a particular shade of gold, red, or blue. I am a mother and a painter, and this is how I try to stay sharp. It’s theory and meditation at the same time. However, today this exercise feels extra special—both futile and imperative—because I am going to dismantle my art studio this weekend. This is a tough move for me. The studio is my work, and I struggle with what giving up that space says about me. Am I less of an artist?
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When we bought our house several years ago we had no plans for children, so from the start, the second bedroom was known only as the studio. We never called it anything else. I had great plans for all that would happen in there. In our apartment I had kept my artwork in a corner of the kitchen, having to beat it back like a weed when it crept too far beyond the place where the walls came together. So I relished having an entire room in which to work, being able to sprawl out and create at will. Sometimes I would go in there late at night. I would leave the blinds open. I liked to look out at the moon, the silvery city sky, and passing cars while I worked. One of my neighbors told me she saw me when she went to bed some nights. “I saw you working in your little glowing window again,
