Bovey Paradiso: my new studio

When Stuart and I moved to Bovey Tracey in Devon last year, the moving took so much time that I wasn’t able to focus on setting up a good working space. I sort of just threw everything into a room and got on with illustrating two Adventuremice books among the clutter. But when I met up with Susan Bradshaw and Jon Arnold from the Bovey Paradiso art centre, they mentioned they had one studio available in their building, and I jumped at the chance.

A lot of people helped me find furniture to fit the space; that plan chest came from Damian Jones, an illustrator and animator in Cornwall. I was able to stop by his place to pick it up when Philip and I were coming back from our Adventuremice Southwest Tour. (Thank you, Damian!)

The building’s great, it was built sometime in the sixteenth century and has been a pub since the 1840s. (You can read about its history on the Paradiso website.) I got to meet a sister and brother who had grown up here, when the layout was a bit different, and my studio had been their bedroom, twenty years apart from each other. Because the building’s so old, none of the walls or floors are exactly straight, so I’ve been propping things up with lots of bits of cardboard.

Thanks, Mark Thomas, for that big filing cabinet under the kitchenette area! The Paradiso is in the second phase of a three-part renewal project: the first phase turned the ground floor into a beautiful art gallery. In the second phase right now, a big professional kitchen has been added out back, and a chef is running a very nice cafe-restaurant, with exhibitions still appearing on the walls. In the third phase of the project, the cafe-restaurant will move to a glass-roofed space next to the gallery. The gallery will go back to being just for exhibitions, and they’ll build a cinema-theatre on the lot out the back. Meanwhile, I get to watch things unfold as I work away upstairs!

Right, back to work! Big thanks to Susan, Jon, Andrew Huckerby, James Glen, David McGahey, David Alexander, Steve Willmore, Richard, Marion, Graham, Janine, Mark, Avril, Becky, Sally, and everyone on the Bovey Paradiso team for making me feel so welcome!