An architect, Barry Silberstang, lined one wall with bookshelves and installed a spiral staircase rising to a platform that extends over half the space. Santry and her reclusive cat, Cappuccino, moved into the apartment, it was a barren box 10 feet wide and 50 feet deep. On another, Dalmatians chase a man wearing a long Chinese braid and a Rei Kawakubo outfit cutouts she originally created for a Comme des Garçons shop.Īrt and fashion “feed into each other,” she said, noting an haute couture sensibility in the paintings of the old masters. Santry featured on the cover of “The Big Book of Fashion Illustration” (Batsford, 2008). One wall displays a rosewood cutout by Ms. Casey Kelbaugh for The New York TimesĪll that scaffolding also made her fearless around heights, which is helpful in an apartment so compact that off-season clothes and occasional overnight guests are tucked into a narrow cubby at the top of a ladder.Ī high ceiling, white paint and natural light allow this live-work space to double as a gallery. The carefully edited space, in Westbeth, a complex for artists, has a sleeping loft. “Painting scenery allowed me to think big and paint large,” she said, alluding to her work on “Hair” and “Jesus Christ Superstar.” Santry got her start right out of art school. But first a nod to a less-expected early influence: Atlas Scenic Studios, a union set-building company in Connecticut, where Ms. She overlooks Washington Street from the 10th floor, right under the Merce Cunningham dance studio. Her rent is a thrilling $894, which is actually higher than the building average of $554 for a studio, because rents there are income-adjusted. Santry moved into the coveted building in 1990 and into her studio apartment, with its 14-foot ceiling and supersize view, seven years later.
Fashion art bank series#
She is busy herself in the basement’s shared sculpture studio, finishing up a series of larger-than-life portraits of Japanese Kabuki actors, which she paints on rosewood cutouts.Ī fashion illustrator and an entrepreneur as well as a fine artist, Ms.
“You see them coming from the opera or going to the ballet to perform or taking a painting to the Whitney.” “Each artist is an inspiration,” she said. With its heady mix of residences, studios, performance spaces and galleries, Westbeth has been as much mentor as home for Ms. CUBBYHOUSE Karen Santry, a painter among many other things, in her apartment, which is decorated with finds of various kinds, as well as artwork by herself and her friends.
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