So I left Art School Santa Cruz because I couldn’t afford it anymore. Rent was way too high. I moved the facility here. I started cleaning up the inside. The floors were dirt, no electricity, no water. This was the early 90’s. It worked out. Little by little I fixed one room at a time. People rented the spaces. My partner Michael Connair and I started building the place out. He worked for PacBell. He didn’t have time to be working here with me. He lost interest and I bought him out.

Now I have 28 artists now in the studio. The place was for sale for 10 years, but no one wanted to touch it. At the time $1.2 million sounded like an exorbitant amount of money. This used to be the hide house for Salz leather tannery. It was during the 1860’s.

We fixed the whole place up; got a new roof. Then the Public Storage Company bought the lot next door. They wanted to tear this building down. Then all of a sudden all the artists were backing the studio. They decided that the city needed to get involved to save this building because it was historic.

The tannery didn’t like it too much. They wanted to sell the whole place, but they did buy it. When they found out they couldn’t tear it down to build a multi-thousand square foot building. I put up my house, my car to buy this. That was five or six years ago.

Right now I am back into plein aire painting. It took a lot of energy to build the seven apartment units next door. If I can keep them rented everything will be fine.

Now Salz tannery all of a sudden has the same idea…to make an art community across the street. But arts aren’t the initial thrust of the project. It is more about low-cost housing. I’m hopeful that they will succeed with the arts complex.