Last Thursday, on Dalmeny Street in Leith, a small victory for creative landlordry was celebrated inside a former Territorial Army drill hall. The swing music pumping out from a wind-up gramophone was barely audible over the sound of painters, illustrators, sculptors, eco-furniture makers, designers, newspaper publishers, postcard crafters, handbag stylists and hospital arts administrators pinching themselves. These are the tenants of Out of the Blue, a mercurial and dogged band of cultural animateurs who have conjured up the £1.25m required to establish 80 light-friendly, draught-free, minimalist installations otherwise known as studios.
Thirty of the units are in former Scottish Power offices at Portobello, two miles away; 50 are here in the converted drill hall. The party marked an important stage in the drill hall's transformation from military forcing ground to honeycomb of sensitivity. It was celebrated, as was proper, by an exhibition of the fortunate residents' handiwork. There were no price tags, in a rebuke to the mysterious economic forces that can pay $135m for a portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer while condemning Gustav Klimt's successors to their parents' dining room. "Aargh, the cruelty!" shudders Susie Keith at the memory. Susie, a plum-and-honey-haired 27-year-old painter, now pays £86 a month for her 225 sq ft of liberty.
The VIPs present included the fifth richest man in Scotland (no names, please) and Robin Harper, the rainbow-scarved Green MacParliamentarian. "If I was to buy something, it would be that," he declared, gesturing at a violently coloured abstract by Richard Strachan, protégé of OOTB and current London gallery starlet. A few paces away, Amanda Catto, head of visual art at the Scottish Arts Council, was biting on her tongue. Soaring property values in Edinburgh have left Britain's major festival city particularly short of spots where a man might fling pigment or knead plaster; Ms Catto clearly seethes, but dare not point the finger. "I have got to be very careful what I say, but something must be done at a high level," she warned. Dana MacLeod, OOTB's project manager, revealed that she has 300 people on the waiting list for accommodation.
This sort of property crisis was unfamiliar to an earlier generation of artists. Matisse lingered for 20 years in one studio, growing a giant philodendron plant in the process. Duchamp deliberately let his studio gather dust, so that Man Ray could photograph it. Van Gogh seems to have had no trouble finding somewhere to prop his easel, but he was not complacent. "I am enjoying life,' he wrote to his brother Theo in January 1882, "and in particular having a studio of my own is too glorious for words."
Ashley More, a local self-sufficient artist, summed up the importance of one's own studio as she admired CiAO architects' U-shape of chalets made from elegant birch ply and translucent polycarbonate panels. "There is a big difference between taking clients here and taking them into your bedroom."
