WOMAN IN ART
Maybe just as artists form a very small percentage of the community, so do art's and artist's appreciators. And you must have a certain amount of devotion to art to remain long in that playroom circle. There were no rules governing that playroom, except that Miss Eberle liked you to say "Good morning," and put you out for the day if you were too noisy. The door was always open between studio and playroom. But the motive was not to keep tabs—at least not in the school-marm way. One would think the children would have invaded Miss Eberle's privacy rather than she theirs, for she stood there all day at a tall stand playing her own games with heavy, messy, soft clay. But she had drawn a chalk mark—like Merlin's magic circle—around the modeling stand, and none dare invade it except—invited."
If the reader has never been in the studio of a sculptor, there is much lacking in his understanding, pleasure and appreciation of the completed statue, the finished work. Every branch of art calls for its needed environment, like any other work. A painter must not have any dust in his or her studio, while a sculptor's workshop is of necessity dust-laden. The first clay modeling is free from dust, but the casting in plaster is a dusty proposition; bronze casting has other difficulties, and the cutting of stone varies from all the others. A painter can get along in a room of rather medium size, but a sculptor needs space, high and wide, step-ladder and platform if the work is large. Many an unused barn has been converted into a very productive studio. For summer, at least, Miss Malvina Hoffman works out her inspirations in such an one, in a charming spot in New York, in which she tells us something of her progress up one of the most difficult paths of art. Home influence, and that of travel, have meant more than pleasure to her; they have been of fundamental and evolutionary value in constant unfolding.
"In the first place, I feel that perhaps the most helpful influence in my life of sculpture has been that from my earliest childhood I have been taught to have a profound respect for hard work and good craftsmanship. My father was a most ardent student of his art all his life, and his pianistic career which enabled him to appear in public for fifty years was based on the most sincere and idealistic foundation."
As a girl, Miss Hoffman's first efforts in drawing and painting were directed toward the idea of "earning a trip abroad," which made the eventual realization of the dream a very vital and keen experience—a sense of appreciation and reverence for the Old World has been a continual inspiration
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