Steve Stringer works at the work of his dreams with a shed in Melrose Hill.
The construction of 500 square feet was not where Stringer, a ceramist based in Los Angeles, imagined a store. The day he found him, he was touring a neighboring property of Western Avenue. When that space turned out to be too big for an art study, the owner told Stringer that he was free to take a look at the shed.
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At first glance, the place seemed a bit of poor quality, Stringer said. But he had good bones and a type of attractiveness of the secret treasure. He told the owner that he would take it.
“But I call it a background,” he said.
After a one -month DIY renovation, Steve's Backhouse opened its doors in May. Each month since then, Stringer has organized a list of creative workshops, most of them exhausted, in the study, including their firm Tattoo a cup Class, during which participants decorate hand rods by Stringer in a mosaic tattoo style.
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Stringer previously brought his workshops to old stores and coffee shops at the time, brought his supplies through the city and did everything possible to adapt to any seat arrangement that his host place had available.
In Backhouse, the ceramist meticulously created a design with something for everyone: bargings for singles, a community table for socializers and smaller tables for groups and dates. There are also some outdoor points, although those were not deliberately planned.
“I'm lucky that the workshops are popular,” said ceramist Steve Stringer. “This is how I could open this as a business.”
“I accidentally sold eight additional tickets for a class,” he said, laughing at himself. Then he improvised.
Stringer took most of a day to establish his tattoo in a cup workshop in mid -September. When it ended, Backhouse looked as aesthetically cured as a restaurant with Michelin stars.
Throughout the room, matching mushroom lamps throw a warm shine on Stringer artisanal wooden tables. On them 32 identical table settings are placed, each containing a pencil No. 2, a under glazer pencil, a draft, a paper towel, a cup of red clay and a flash sheet, an impression of selected Stringer signature designs, modeling after those created by tattoo artists.
It is more difficult than people planning to find things to draw in the place, Stringer said before the September workshop, so they provide flash leaves as an inspiration for attendees. This particular blade had a summer theme, with shrimp cocktail sketches and a coil coil palette.
“I'm not valuable about my own art,” he said. “I don't intend to underline it, but I like people to be interested enough to want to put it in their piece too.”
The Steve's Backhouse facade presents a large version of a dog that appears frequently in the art of Steve Stringer, which was painted by Jenna Homen.
Stringer said he has always had a management of his style of illustration, picturesque, ingenious and a little kitsch, but the distinctive aspect that his ceramics share also developed by necessity.
“It is quite complicated to resort to ceramics and make it maintain, to sustain,” Stringer said. “Then, anyway, once I found the materials that worked, that dictated my style. Everything looks a little hard, something like a child did it.”
Fiona Chen draws her pencil cup designs, the first step of the tattoo of a cup process.
Recurrent reasons, including a trio of dog -owned dogs that several workshop attendees adopted for their own cups, adorn several original Stringer originals scattered by backhouse.
Stringer built most of the interior of the study, except for selected furniture and an Ikea shelf unit that painted blue cobalt to coincide with the colorful aesthetic of the room. In equal parts capricious and cured, the space landed visually somewhere between a kindergarten classroom and a museum gallery.
It was unequivocally the work of an artist.
“I definitely always liked art things, [but] I didn't know what path was going to take, “Stringer said.” It turns out that he only took all the roads. “
Until recently, Stringer's biography was quite standard for a Hollywood transplant.
He obtained his mastery in writing scripts in Texas, moved to Los Angeles and Grinded in an assistant job after another before finally obtaining the concert of dreams in a writer's room, writing in the programs “Roswell, New Mexico” and “Tell Me A Story”. Then, as the story progresses for many in Hollywood, the Covid-19 pandemic hit, causing a deceleration of the industry and leaving Stringer without work.
But then the plot's turn came: Stringer hit the gold again.
At first, Ceramics was just an escape from the monotonous writing work writing Stringer feared.
Steve Stringer, Center, instructs a participant of the event during his tattoo tattoo.
“I definitely did not imagine it as an income flow. It was therapeutic,” he said. In addition to that, Stringer was in a tattoo kick but too reluctant at risk to dye anyone who is not himself. Ceramics was a perfect substitute.
But Stringer never did anything halfway, said John Bellina, his former friend and former roommate. The two moved together to Los Angeles after completing the script master's program at the University of Texas in Austin in 2013.
“Although I am not 100% excellent with art, I love doing art things and being close to people and simply doing something creative,” said Mary Anne Rose, who attended the tattoo of a taza workshop with her daughter, Jen Rose.
“I would write a complete album in his room, and I wouldn't even hear him record it. And he would be fantastically compound,” Bellina said about his friend's many talents. When Stringer outlined, he said: “It wasn't just scribbles. He was meticulously drawn. And his lines were perfect.”
Then, when Stringer's casual hobby became a full business, Bellina said he was not surprised. The artistic practice of the ceramist integrated much of the work he did before.
Elaine Chen draws with a pencil in her cup.
As a television writer, said Bellina, Stringer had a strong voice and “he could always find a path to the joke so fast.”
It is the same with its ceramics, which often appears Word games or other jokes, Bellina said. “You have such a limited space to make three words really establish and get exactly what you are looking for,” he said.
In addition to that, Bellina and Stringer, as postgraduate students in their 20 years, together they taught writing classes of undergraduate scripts, “and I suppose that in a long and indicator way those terminal titles arose,” Bellina said.
Steve Stringer, center, instructs a cup workshop during his tattoo.
In his September workshop, Stringer shrugged in the archetype of art teacher like an old sweater. During the first five minutes, he gave a monologue, making his way through a step -by -step explanation of the “tattoo” process, which joke: “It's not one thing, I simply invented it for Tiktok.”
“The bets are low. You really can't ruin it,” he said, assuring his students. “And if you forget something, I'm happy to repeat. I do it all the time.”
During the next two hours, Stringer tied the room, stopping to sharpen the pencils or praise the designs of the participants. When Ellie Alfeld asked if her low -glazed pencil lines were too thick, she assured her that they were right.
“Do you have to say that, it's perfect?” Alfeld's girlfriend, Sofia Leimer asked. Stringer responded quickly: “No”, so seriously it was impossible not to believe him.
Stringer's favorite place to stay was at the main door, where he could monitor the interior and outdoor crowds. When someone called him in the middle of the task, he said: “I will return.”
But he never hunched, said the assistant of the Celine Cormier workshop. “He only appears when you need that support or address,” he said.
Lucero García shows his “tattooed” cup that combines with the tattoo of his arm.
Cormier has attended several of Stringer's workshops, including its first cup class tattoo. She said she continues to return because, for her, there is nothing like the atmosphere that Stringer creates.
“The artistic scene can be a bit exclusive,” said Cormier.
In Backhouse, where the door is open and the fresh flowers are on the table, “you almost feel you go to someone's house,” he said.
In other words, Stringer could make his money believe and teach ceramics. But “Steve's main business is the art of joining the people,” said Josie Francis, co-founder of Creative Arts Practice Fuzz & Fuzz and a Co-Stringer co-elanfitriona of Workshop.
Steve Stringer draws several recurring characters in their ceramics, including a trio of dogs that sit here at a table.
Stringer's ceramic practice also orchestrated casual meetings in his own life.
Bridget Draugh, Stringer's girlfriend of almost two years, moved coincidentally in the hinge in the spring of 2024 when he stumbled upon a ceramist whose work looked familiar. Finally, he realized that he had used one of the boy's cups in a friend's house a few days before.
The cup was from the first market that was sold in which the friend of Draughh had been his first client.
The two sent a message from one side about the other about the chance of everything, and it is not necessary to say: “The date was very good,” said Espraugh, smiling shyly.
When Stringer told Disraugh about his idea for Backhouse, she was not sure if it was feasible, financially or otherwise.
“But he only knows his personality,” said Espraugh, “has the creative side, but it is also a planner and very diligent and attentive to details, sometimes it can be a perfectionist.”
“It was simply like, 'Yes, if someone is going to do it, it's you,” he said.
Celine Cormier paints a cherry in her cup, which planned to give a friend as a birthday gift.
“Somehow,” Stringer said, “I feel much more as if I was doing this. I loved television writing when I did, but I like to look back, maybe I never fit completely.”
At this time, Stringer is increasing wholesale agreements and seeks to test a drop -style model in backhouse. He is not sure of what is still for the place, but he is happy that, unlike when he worked in the entertainment industry, he can make that decision when the time comes.
“For a good reason, television has structure and rules,” he said. “But I can invent the rules here.”
