Her hands, arms, and clothing splattered with five different colors of paint, Nancy Cohn leaves her brush in the mixing pot to answer the phone. As she heads into her office, she punches off the Roches playing on the boom box. After she picks up the phone, the other fabric painters in the studio smile and listen to her end of a familiar conversation.
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Cohn began her business five years before the birth of her first child, but because the evolving fabric-painting business required her near-constant presence, Sammy knows the business like an employee. Laughing, she says, “He spends time here, answers the phone like a secretary would, plays with the calculators, gives business advice.”
After painting silk for someone else who used her designs, and working in Loop retail to pay the grocery bills, Cohn decided that she could paint fabric on her own. She began by painting pillowcases in a nickel-and-dime operation out of a shared studio on Lincoln Avenue (which she now occupies on her own).
“People tell us what they want, and we do it. If they want a fish print, we paint them a fish print. However, we don’t keep a large quantity of prints on hand; we do them as we get orders for them. That’s basically because it really has been and probably will be a real hand-to-mouth company, so there’s no room for mistakes. We have to use everything we paint. One day I accidentally dripped paint on a print, and though really I hate this drippy-painted stuff, I dripped here and I dripped there and then a little more, and I guess it looked great because that mistake eventually became one of my biggest sellers.”
