Cornel Rubino's latest paintings hang on the walls of a gallery in New Orleans' Warehouse District. His commercial illustrations reinterpret 30,000-year-old cave drawings on bottles of Cote du Rhone.
For 20 years, he called Atlanta home. Now he is your neighbor.
Rubino, 50, and his textile colorist wife, Linda Gravina Ridings, 49, moved to Baltimore's Charles Village in August, taking on their first mortgage and quickly ferreting out authentic Italian grocers.
"It's a mix of the funk and the beauty that really draws us here," Rubino said, gazing out a window of his gracious Maryland Avenue rowhouse. "It's that snap. This city feels like a harbor for artists looking for a place to live where they can afford to do what they do."
Drawn by the port city's quirky reputation, layers of history, and affordable living and studio space, photographers, sculptors, painters and playwrights are migrating here in ever increasing numbers to discover a creative haven along the Chesapeake Bay.
Hard figures are elusive, but sources from real estate agents to art consultants say Baltimore is pulling in self-taught and trained artists alike from cities such as Minneapolis, Newark, N.J., Providence, R.I., Seattle, and Washington.
What many artist types find appealing in Baltimore might appall civic boosters.
New York art critic Jenifer Borum calls it "the grime." Enamelist Helen Elliott calls it "the grit." Rubino calls it Baltimore's "shabby edges."
Stage manager Janice Campbell, 38, a Midwestern transplant who discovered a housing gem near Patterson Park, said "this city attracts nontraditional minds, and it balances the weird without being rigid."
This is, after all, the petri dish author Anne Tyler and filmmaker John Waters already call home.
A year ago, Megan Hamilton, program director for the Creative Alliance in Highlandtown, began casually tracking the trend. She found cheap real estate to be a magnet.
"Bottom line, what they come to find is that you can move here and find a loft and it's not going to cost you an arm and a leg," Hamilton said. "For working artists in their 40s and 50s, that's a huge draw."
Consider these examples:
Three years ago, a Baltimore native freshly returned from Chicago settled into a 10,000-square-foot studio in a former necktie factory on West Baltimore Street. He pays $300 more for the hangar-sized space than he did for a Chicago loft one-sixth the size.
Two years ago, a sculptor and a landscape figure painter bought a pair of rowhouses in Pigtown for $19,000, tearing down the common walls and decorating the space with their own works.
Last spring, a theater couple closed on a $60,000 former TV repair shop across the street from the soon-to-open Patterson Studios, home of the Creative Alliance. The couple moved into the second story, built a cedar deck, and hope to open a cabaret in the former showroom this spring.
Last summer, a Newark painter and sculptor bought the Holy Grail of art studios: a 5,000-square-foot, stoned-faced behemoth in the new Station North arts district for $123,500.
Baltimore may be just the latest industrial port town in the shadow of a more glamorous city to find itself suddenly alluring. Tacoma, Wash., once the punchline of jokes in Seattle, is experiencing a similar incursion of artists into its long-abandoned turn-of-the-century warehouses and Art Deco buildings.
Among the dollars-and-cents reasons the new arrivals give for moving here are incentive programs the city offers to potential homebuyers, down payment grants, historic preservation tax credits, interest-free state money for settlement costs, and grants for closing costs on homes purchased in the city's three empowerment zones.
Searching for bargains, artists have moved into Hampden, Highlandtown, Hamilton, Pigtown, Butchers Hill, and along Lake Montebello, Maryland Avenue and Keswick Road. Edgy and established neighborhoods alike are fair game, said Randi Vega, the city's director of cultural affairs.
"Artists are moving all over Baltimore, and that in turn is giving the whole city a reputation as being artist-friendly," Vega said.
Borum, the Upper West Side art critic, takes the train from New York's Penn Station to Baltimore's Penn Station twice a month to hang out at Spoons, a Federal Hill coffeehouse with an arts-loving clientele.
"People in New York are freaking out. They're like, 'Why do you like Baltimore so much?'" said the 38-year-old Columbia University doctoral candidate. "I love the restaurants, I love the food, the people are great."
Folk artist Tom Patterson, curator of the continuing exhibit High on Life: Transcending Addition at the American Visionary Art Museum on Key Highway, tried to pin down the city's subtle allure on the road from Baltimore to his home in Winston-Salem, N.C.
"Visually, it's just an appealing place with great venues for art," Patterson said. "It's a lively scene."
"Seductive," Borum added.
Vega, the city's arts booster, chalks up the newfound appreciation to word-of-mouth promotion: "Artists talk to each other, and the buzz gets created person-to-person."
Elliott, 54, whose latest exhibit of porcelain enamel on steel closed last month at the Parish Gallery in Georgetown, knows something of that buzz.
She found studio space on Druid Hill last summer and began work on a public art commission for Baltimore Public Schools. She has fallen hard for her new home base.
In the abandoned rowhouses that urban planners and city natives decry as eyesores, Elliott sees raw spaces filled with potential.
"I see beauty in things that have eroded," she explained.
One of Elliott's friends, an abstract expressionist known as roycrosse, found a rough jewel along North Avenue for $24.70 a square foot.
His century-old building, a former architect's office, has 12-foot ceilings and room enough out back for a lap pool. In July, he christened his place Westnorth Studios.
There are no easels inside; roycrosse prefers to nail canvas to the wall to draw and then to paint the canvases on the floor. The first story holds his sculpting studio and an exhibit area. The second floor contains storage closets, sun-filled rooms for painting, a printmaking office and a nook where he plays a set of steel drums. Scattered about are copies of Motorcycle Cruiser magazine, cans of WD40 and Harley-Davidson ads of the 100th anniversary edition bike he covets.
He left northern New Jersey because of skyrocketing rents - he lived across the Hudson River from Manhattan and saw the Twin Towers collapse - and initially looked at Richmond and Philadelphia.
"The thing about Baltimore was it feels like a place where things can happen. It's small, but animated," said roycrosse, 57, resting a hand on an ornate dark wood staircase that sweeps from the first floor to the third.
He still has Garden State tags on his motorcycle, but he is already at work on an exhibit of yarn-and-steel chairs to be installed next month on traffic islands along North Avenue as part of the "Gotta Have Art" Celebration of the Station North arts district.
It is typical for newly arrived artists to swiftly lay down roots, said Hamilton, of the Creative Alliance. "These are people very much invested in community. They're willing to be connected and work to make things better."
Rubino and his wife, Linda, attended all 40 showings at a November symposium of local short films. They also joined the Charles Village Benefits District to help with community beautification efforts. "We are determined to be a part of this city," she said.
The couple was inspired to move to Baltimore thanks in no small measure to photographer Paula Gately Tillman, who moved to Hampden from Atlanta in 1998. They are the second pair of Atlanta artists she has persuaded to relocate here.
"No one really knew Baltimore - they knew Chicago or Washington or Philadelphia, they had no idea about the museums, the Blacks in Wax Museum, the Visionary Arts Museum, the history of the city. People started coming up to see us and sleep on our sofa and hang out," Tillman said.
Rubino and Ridings bought in partly because they were being priced out of Atlanta: rent on their apartment in the popular Virginia-Highlands neighborhood had climbed from $250 to $1,500.
The mortgage on their rehabbed rowhouse, purchased in August for $164,000, costs $800 less a month than their rent in Atlanta.
Inside is an oasis of Italian antiques, Ridings' multimedia wall hangings and Rubino's paintings of languid faces and figures. A steel bra she produced sits tongue in cheek on a side table in the parlor. His illustrations from The New Yorker magazine lean against a wall in his top floor studio.
In the fridge, a small frozen octopus defrosts in a salt water bath, destined to become insalata di polipo.
Someone has stashed a half bag of satiny dark chocolate hazelnuts from Kirchmayr Chocolatier in Timonium in a drawer in the TV room.
Standing on his marble steps, a peach tree dominating the cubicle-sized front yard, Rubino feels right at home.
"Gosh, we're glad to be here. It's a real happening place."