Anny Crane comes from art.
Her great grandmother is an oil painter; her grandmother works in watercolors; her mother stamps; her aunt is a woodworker. Perhaps it was natural, then, that the 28-year-old Clearwater native would become an artist.
To call Crane an artist isn’t quite right, though. She’s more of a multimedia businesswoman, adept at painting, photography, paper making, textile arts and more. She recently moved to Gainesville and started her own studio, the Toska Textile and Art Studio, where she offers classes on everything from knitting, to natural dyeing to paper making and beyond.
“I’ve always been around art,” Crane says. In high school, she was primarily a painter. She couldn’t afford art school, so she went to college for psychology, hoping to practice art therapy. Then, one of her grandmothers died, leaving her devastated. “I was having a tough time,” Crane recalls. “I was living alone, working all the time, I was 20, and I didn’t realize how hard it is to, like, exist.” She inherited her grandmother’s sewing kit and became interested in textiles, moving from Pensacola to Florida State University, where she learned paper making.
From Tallahassee, she moved to New York and hated it. On a whim, she moved to L.A., where she became interested in textiles. Shortly after, she moved back to New York and began working with the Textile Arts Center. “They were my people,” she says. “I learned so many things.” But New York was still a grind, so Crane began looking for other places to pursue art.
One of her best friends attended the University of Florida, and every time Crane visited Gainesville, she was impressed with the art community. She’d recently reunited with an ex-boyfriend, Michael Flament, who would soon become her husband, and he also liked Gainesville. “My partner describes the art community here as ‘very tenacious,’” Crane says. “We have a really amazing community.”
Crane opened Toska on September 12 in the house she shares with Flament near the Duck Pond. Flament is a writer who works as a court reporter to help pay the bills. “I do what I can do to support Anny in this,” he says. As Crane is quick to note, that includes giving up space in their house for the studio. “We try to make it comfortable, but you’re not in my home,” she says of the studio space. “We have a couch and a reading area, and we play records on the record player. We have a huge yard, so we try to do classes outside if it’s nice.”
Inside the house, several lap looms and spools of yarn are arranged neatly. Outside, tall stalks of bamboo enclose a spacious yard where one Sunday afternoon, Crane, Flament and their friend, Michelle Eshelman, practice indigo dyeing.
“I really admire everything Anny is doing,” says Eshelman, a senior in the architecture program at UF. “I’ve lived here for five years, and I don’t think we’ve ever had anything like this. I’m really interested in the art scene here, but I think it can be hard to break into. This is such a valuable addition because it’s so open to everyone. You can learn things here you can’t learn anywhere else.”
Crane seems to thrive on old, even arcane techniques, both as an artist and a teacher. The very name of the studio, Toska, is a Russian word that has no exact translation, but as Crane’s favorite writer, Vladimir Nabokov, once explained, “At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness.”
That sort of nostalgia—a love-sickness
for art forms like textiles—gives Crane’s
studio meaning.
“I’m about learning techniques,” she says. “Learn it 100 percent the traditional way and then figure out how to make it less expensive.”
Crane has serious plans for Toska. In the short term, she is planning a class in December called “Handmade Holidays,” where participants can learn how to make knitted hats, handkerchiefs, and other holiday-themed pieces.
In the long term, Crane hopes to buy an historic house in Gainesville and live on the top floor, while offering the bottom to artists in residence. She is also hoping to set up a collaboration with the Harn Museum, and she plans on offering classes for children.
“Our biggest goal is hopefully within a year, the studio can be on its own legs,” she says. “I don’t want to rush anything,” though.
“Since this is my first business, I really want everything to be perfect.”