For two fast-rising painters on the Eastside Culture Crawl, finding decent studio spaces has been crucial to their chosen careers

To an outsider, Fiona Ackerman’s studio might look considerably less exotic than, say, Andy Warhol’s Factory. Tucked up three flights of stairs in the labyrinthine Parker Street Studios, it has paint spattering the floors, cans sprouting brushes of all shapes and sizes, and multicoloured abstract canvases lining the white walls. A big open window looks out on industrial rooftops, with netting to prevent pigeons from taking roost. But this is Ackerman’s Factory, every bit as inspirational to her as the New York spot that gave birth to soup-can pop art was to Warhol—or the adobe New Mexico retreat was to Georgia O’Keeffe, or the Montmartre workspace was to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, for that matter.

“This studio is perfect for me—it’s a dream come true,” the young artist says, sitting as the grey light of a November day streams in the old, multipaned windows. “It’s having a space where you can treat your practice like a serious artistic endeavour. Having a space where you feel comfortable to do your own work—where you’re at home in your practice.”

Ackerman’s art is taking off: she had her candy-coloured, collagelike canvases featured in a solo exhibit at the Diane Farris Gallery in May, and she’s represented by galleries in Atlanta and Los Angeles. She credits her fledgling success partly to the East Side sanctuary that she moved into just over two years ago.

“If you don’t have space then you don’t have the opportunity to take risks,” says the Montreal-born artist, who paints on the floor, spattering and swirling her acrylics and oils from above. She often works on a piece over weeks or months, overpainting and reorganizing the patterns. “If the studio is too expensive, then you have to take on another job and you don’t have time. And if it’s not large enough, then you can’t store your work.” In the old space—a small studio above the Interurban Gallery—that she had after graduating from the then Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, she found she was trying to do “six paintings in one”, just because she didn’t have room to work on several pieces simultaneously.

As thousands of people descend on the 13th annual Eastside Culture Crawl this weekend (November 20 to 22), they’ll be entering the inner sanctum of the artist—the place that many, like Ackerman, have worked so hard to secure, the place where hardly anyone else steps through the doors over the course of a year. Studio space has rarely been so scarce in this city. And when an artist finally scores that spot, or decides to give up the day job and pour everything into their work, it’s a massive turning point.

“It’s amazing how my own work has progressed, from my peers looking at it and definitely from the Crawl,” says Valerie Arntzen, Crawl executive director and an assemblage artist who used to run the huge event, manage her film-industry work, and also practise her art in an office in her home. She moved into her studio at the Paneficio Studios on Keefer Street just four years ago. Talking over the phone amid last-minute Crawl preparations, she sums up the benefits of a decent studio space this way: “If you don’t have that sanctuary, you progress slower.”

Arntzen has seen members of the Crawl forced by tough times to give up their studios in the past year. But it continues to impress her how many artists can hold on to those spaces in this economy—and how many new ones are still making the leap into the studio full-time. The Crawl is showing more than 300 people in 60 studios this year; many, Arntzen observes, are surviving by splitting those spaces up into smaller bits and sharing them with others.