From: Jessica Hoagland
Saint Louis, Missouri
Carole Wantz’s former studio has burned down, and it’s very sad.
I used to sit and marvel at the beauty of the Irwin Block building through my car windshield, admiring the color and the detail.
I met Carole in Saint Louis, where she continued to paint; I’m from Columbus as well. Carole tells me she would host a salon in that studio every Friday night, up on the second floor.
Young Chef Gregory would come, hauling heavy appetizers, and all the “young guns of Cummins” would come. An eclectic group including Rob Kirkpatrick, David Barnard, Bonnie Dean, Eric Roberts, Kitty Boon and Ravi Bugga would assemble, each bringing newspapers and libations and ready to discuss the news of the day.
It was a remarkable time where great minds were collected in Columbus, and Carole painted that community in the specific. Her style became universal, and those specific people are now all of us. Buildings are all about the people inside the buildings; my Dad once housed his advertising studio in that same space, and I know a yoga studio moved in much later in time. I wonder who else occupied that second floor studio with the bay windows.
Carole says that Xenia Miller used to send over her gardener, Jack, to plant fat petunias that cascaded lusciously from the window boxes; Carole would fly balloons from the window and drop petunias to passersby below. Everybody loved catching the petunias, and Jose Uranga caught one for the Channel 6 news cameras one day!
The last petunia has been thrown from the studio in the Irwin Block building, but Carole says it feels like a new beginning. From the ashes we rise, but first, we say goodbye to the “Petunia Studio” in the Irwin Block.
