Perpetual Bloom
By Diana Myers Bennet-Roberts
A visit to Tom Steigerwald's Elkins Park Studio is like stepping into summer in ancient Rome.
Even if you happened to visit in the middle of February, you could disregard the calendar and forget you are in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania. Inside the studio of Tom Steigerwald it is perpetual summer in ancient Rome. Painted stark white with an easy-facing wall that is mostly glass, this sunny, airy space is any artist's dream. Not only is there room for Steigerwald to maneuver his large paintings and have a workstation with his paints and tools generously spread out, the studio comprises three spacious "chambers," each with its own site-specific purpose. In addition to the daylight-filled painting studio which also has track lighting on the ceiling that can be directed wherever he wants it as his current work in progress, up the stairs is Steigerwald's woodshop where he cuts and sands the intricately shaped pieces of tight pressed Masonite that are his canvasses.
Back downstairs through the open doorway, we enter a room that is, in essence, the atrium of a Roman villa: an outside-in sort of place. The furnishings are spare: a small round table with four chairs, a small white desk and chair, and an overstuffed comfy white armchair over which is draped a white fur lap-robe - the perfect spot to contemplate the meaning of life, the universe and everything else. Punctuated by a gas "wood stove," the north wall is adorned by Steigerwald's paintings . . .
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MONTGOMERY LIFESTYLES MAGAZINE
Summer 1998