I’ve been collecting images of artist studios and writing spaces as inspiration for creating my own art/writing workspace. Some of these images are of famous artists and writers. It’s been so interesting to match the creative mind with the space that inspires it. Most of the creative spaces that have been most inspiring to me belong to people who are not famous, or at least unknown to me, and perhaps I’ll share those another time.

Here I’ve matched the spaces with famous quotes from the inhabitants. See if you can guess who they are. If you can’t, the names are listed below.

1. “With age art and life grow together.” 

2. “I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.”

3. “My library is an archive of longings.”

4. “My fan mail is enormous. Everyone is under six.”

5. “All sorrows can be borne if you can put them into a story.”

6. “I think of my studio as a vegetable garden, where things follow their natural course. They grow, they ripen. You have to graft. You have to water.”

7. “I believe in deeply ordered chaos.”

8. “What you do when you paint, you take a brush full of paint, get paint on the picture, and you have faith.”

9. “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”

10. “Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?”

11. “Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?”

12. “In the arts, as in life, everything is possible provided it is based on love.”

Artists and writers: 1-George Braque, 2-Henri Matisse, 3-Susan Sontag, 4-Alexander Calder, 5-Karen Blixen, 6-Joan Miro, 7-Francis Bacon, 8-Willem de Kooning, 9-Jack London, 10-Frida Kahlo, 11-Annie Dillard, 12-Marc Chagall