Welcome to my studio

Welcome to Blue Antler Studio and our cabin on the ridge. It’s where I store my childhood memories. It’s where I go to be with family and friends and escape Florida’s heat. It’s where I go to be inspired and gather with kindred spirits who are living life on the creative side. I may have sand in my shoes, but I have Kentucky clay in my soul.

In 1983 I was a young wife and new mother adjusting to life far from my family and childhood home in what seemed to me like a foreign land – Florida, my husband’s home state. I longed for a simple retreat, a modest place close to my family and friends back on  Rocky Round Ridge in Kentucky, my childhood home. Then during a trip back home I stumbled upon an old log cabin in a neighboring county, I knew it would eventually be the fulfillment of that dream. Forgotten and forlorn, the sad structure slumped under the weight of time and neglect but it was beautiful to me and to my husband, so log by log the dilapidated structure found new life on the ridge. In return the cabin has kept me rooted to a simpler life and has provided shelter, not only to my family but to my creative spirit. Before long a second neglected log structure found refuge on the ridge and eventually gave rise to Blue Antler Studio. Today it is that retreat I dreamed of and where I go to gather with family, friends and fellow artists.

Life within the reach of the Atlantic’s salty spray is about as far from the ridge and the dreams of my youth as I could imagine. Our circa 1940′s beach cottage is not the two hundred year old stone farm-house of my life plan. Rolling waves not rolling hills lay beyond my window; the passage of time is seen in the ebb and flow of the tide not the wax and waning of seasons; and the first snowbirds not the first snowfall herald in the holidays. While I am, and will always be a ridge-top country girl, and beautiful old stone structures still populate my dreams, I have come to embrace flip-flops and my life in the salt spray; but my heart still leads me back often to my studio on the ridge.

blue antler studio