Drawing Room: A Practice Space

Someone asked me what I do last week. I said I run a creative space called Drawing Room. She said, "oh, like a paint and sip?"

It's the obvious comparison. There isn't really another word for what we are yet. A place where adults make something creative together, with materials and instruction. An event that's designed for a fun experience. We do offer those things, so I understand why someone would put us in that group before we've had a chance to show them what actually happens here.

Drawing Room did start with a drop-in event format. Before our now two locations, I was teaching workshops in my apartment. I invited strangers to gather to make ceramics, draw with pastels, and I hosted events like open mics. Each event was typically 2 to 3 hours long. But there was always an undercurrent to this I was interested in the whole time. I wanted our conversations to go deeper. I wanted us to connect with each other and to ourselves on a level that I didn't see happening in most spaces I knew of. The making was the vehicle, but what I was really curious about was what was happening between us while we were making, and how that might change the way we moved through the world afterwards.

Turns out that what I was trying to build wasn't possible in a single evening. Deeper connection takes time. Real trust takes time. Whatever happens when you keep showing up for yourself and others doesn’t fit into 2 hours. When we started building around longer seasons, week after week, this started happening naturally. We also stopped needing to walk out with a perfect, finished product. You could make something that didn't look the way you wanted, and still have it be the most useful thing you made that week, because you learned something about yourself, the material, the process, or even just something about a person you’d see next week.

One way to locate Drawing Room is on a spectrum. On one end, those one-night creative experiences. On the other, perhaps a school. Somewhere you’d go to seriously to learn new skills, often toward a career, under the guidance of instructors who evaluate what you produce.

Both have their place. But what I wanted, and what I've heard from a lot of the people who've stayed with us, sits somewhere in between. A place where you can learn, return to, and actually get better at something. And a place where the practice is in service of something else, the conversations, the connections, the slow work of finding out what you actually care about and who you are.

We take the practice seriously, but we don't grade. When someone shares something, we try to use the language of noticing rather than assessment. What did you try? What did you notice? What surprised you? We're not interested in whether your piece is good necessarily, but rather what you came into contact with by making it, and whether you’re interested in trying it again.

So what is Drawing Room actually? I've been working on how to say this for a while, and the best I've come up with is this: Drawing Room is a practice space. Somewhere you come back to, not somewhere you visit.

What we're practicing, at the smallest scale, is a kind of agency. You decide what to put on the page. You decide the color, the shape, the weight of the mark. Nobody tells you what has to be there. Over the course of a session you make a hundred small choices, and then you have something that exists simply because you chose to make it that way. You can see what you chose, and that tells you something about yourself. Making is one way to develop the practice. Being witnessed by others while you try something new is another. There are more we're working on.

People come to Drawing Room looking for a space for themselves. That might sound like wanting a place to relax. But from our perspective, it’s more about being somewhere you don't have to be a specific version of yourself. Most of where we spend time, there's a role attached. The professional, the student, the spouse, the parent. Each one asks for a particular version of you. The parts of you that aren't needed in those spaces start to go unused. And over time, you lose contact. You stop knowing what you actually want, because you haven't had to know in order to make it through the week.

You can also take your practice with you. The difference between showing up for yourself and showing up for what's expected of you starts to be noticeable, and once you've felt it, you can find it again. It might be in the half-second before you answer a question or a small moment when you noticed you picked something that you actually want, not what someone else wants for you. Over time, the practice stops being something you have to go somewhere to find.

Of course, you have to practice it somewhere first. Drawing Room spaces are designed like a home. This was accidental at first, because it started in my apartment, but it became intentional. You take your shoes off at the door. The tables in the middle of the room are dinner tables, meant for 8-10 people to eat together. There are couches and rugs and floor cushions nearby. The lighting is warm. There are lots of plants. The walls are colorful. You can bring your laptop. You can bring food. You can sit on the floor if you want.

When everyone is in socks, we’re standing on the same floor. We leave our outside selves at the door with our shoes. Couches produce one kind of conversation and dinner tables produce another, and we need both. So, Drawing Room feels like another home.

On a Thursday evening you might walk into Open Hours and run into someone you've taken a Cohort Program with, an instructor hosting the room for the night, a student gallery opening in the workshop room, a member who brought a friend to show them the space. There's no time limit and no agenda. You can come in early and stay late, or drop in for twenty minutes. We don’t really get this kind of encounter in adult life anymore because we're all running on calendars. People come to the space for their own reasons and end up in the same room.

This serendipity works for newcomers too. I remember walking into Open Hours sometime in our first year, when people were still getting to know of us. Two strangers were sitting at a table, and one of them struck up a conversation with the other. I remember being surprised at how open both of them were at starting and receiving the conversation, and how that felt really different. That was one of the first moments I knew what we were building was real and it was working.

A pattern I've noticed is that people find Drawing Room at moments of transition. A breakup, a move, a job that stopped fitting, a first year in New York, the end of something. I used to think this was coincidence, but it really isn't. You can't figure out who you're becoming if you’re only ever in spaces that require you to keep being who you were. That's often what brings people here.

What people describe after they've been with us for a while isn't usually that they've developed a skill. Most do, of course. But more often they talk about something else. One member recently said, mid-conversation, 'yeah, I guess I am an artist.' Something about how she saw herself had shifted. The capacity to make is something all of us carry. Some people just haven't done it in a while.

When that starts to hold, things start happening. We've watched people leave jobs that stopped fitting, start their own things, host their own events, say yes to things they would have declined a year before, or say no to things they had been meaning to end. I’m not claiming Drawing Room caused any of these decisions. More likely, the practice gave them somewhere to develop the muscle of choosing, week after week. When the bigger decisions came, that muscle was available to them.

For a while we described Drawing Room as a third space, that idea of a place that's not home and not work. Drawing Room does a lot of what a good third space does, so the framing isn't wrong. But third space is a broad category. It includes the coffee shop and the library and the bar around the corner, most of which are neutral containers that let whatever wants to happen in them happen. Drawing Room is organized around the practice. Practice space is what we've started calling it.

The next time someone asks me what I do and reaches for paint and sip or a school, I'll tell them Drawing Room is a practice space. We practice showing up as ourselves and building the muscle of choosing what's actually ours. Most people don't have a word for that yet, but we’re hoping to build a world that does.

We do this through groups that meet over weeks, through days reserved for deeper dives, through open-ended time where people come to continue their practice. What holds it together is that people come back. If you find yourself at one of those transition moments, or if you've just been looking for a space that doesn't require you to be a specific version of yourself, we'd love to have you.