For some people, home is a place where you store your clothes and sleep at night — but not for artist Storm Ritter.
Not content with the “tiny” lodgings she had for 10 years in the West Village, where she slept on a futon next to her works in progress, she set out to find a space where she could live and paint that felt like her own little world.
“I looked at hundreds of apartments,” she relates. “I knew this was the right one the minute I walked into the room with the 16-foot ceiling and the beautiful natural light.”
The first thing she did was paint the place (by herself – it took a month) as it was completely “landlord white” when she moved in.
“I used so many colors,” she says. “Purples, blues, dark greens are in the living room, mulberry and raspberry are upstairs in the bedroom, and there is a mustard gold ceiling in the studio. I wanted the living room to be mystical and moody. And I love (the 60’s tv show) ‘I Dream of Jeannie,’ so my bedroom was inspired by that.”
The only thing that she added physically to the space was the record station, with a shelf for the two different turntables and shelves under the stairs for the record collection. On display on the wall above the turntables are whatever she has been listening to lately, which at the moment includes Elton John, Deep Purple, Cat Stevens, Serge Gainsbourg, The Monkees and Lou Reed, but might just as easily consist of jazz, classical or opera, of which she is definitely a fan.
“I love opera,” she admits. “It makes me cry, it makes me happy, it makes me want to paint.”
Ritter, by her own admission, spends a lot of time painting.
“Normally I paint daily,” she says. “The main reason I paint is to learn more about myself. When I’m in a painting flow, I’ll paint for one to two weeks straight, usually at 6 a.m. until I crash, anywhere from 8 to 11 p.m. I’ll take breaks throughout the day to keep a balance. I typically work on three to ten paintings in rotation.”
There’s a small dining area that’s used (in addition to actual dining) as her office, as well as for website maintenance, scheduling, and meetings. She typically does Tarot readings on the table as well. It’s also where she writes in her sketchbooks, which are an essential part of her process.
“I’ve been working seriously in sketchbooks since 2008,” Ritter explains. “They usually have my conceptual plans, rough illustrations, small paintings for palette tests or composition layouts, or literal receipts for business purchases. They are visual archive diaries — I use a few books a year and then new ones in the following. I put a heavy priority on a physical archive as opposed to a digital one. Revisiting past books provides insight more often than not.”
“I’m a hermit,” she muses. “I’m here all the time. It’s my pirate ship. It always needs to look like a movie set! The apartment is a character in my life. … It’s still not done. It will never be done. Where you live is a huge part of how you create and how you function.”
It was a pleasant surprise to Ritter when she found out from one of her neighbors that a previous tenant was the actor, singer and playwright Jackie Curtis, famously known as a Warhol Superstar.
“It’s cool that there was another hyper-creative person living here!” she exclaims. “I like to think that Warhol came through.”
The walls are completely covered with her own paintings, all of which are for sale and available for viewing until her next show, which is in the planning stages. Until then, you can count on her doing what she does in her perfect place.
“It feels like me,” she says of her home. “I feel like I’m living inside of my own mind. I’m a really happy person — I feel like I have a connection to something magical.”
Storm Ritter can be found online at stormritter.com and on Instagram at @stormritter. Also, her cat has her own Instagram (of course!) @studiocatvelvet.
