In July 1974, Marcelin and Roseline moved into a top-floor apartment in a building at 4897 chemin Queen-Mary on the corner at rue Lemieux in Montréal. In addition to the apartment, Marcelin also rented what had once been a parking garage at ground level. He had approximately half of the floor space at this level for his studio (about 74 sq. m. or 800 sq. ft.); the other half contained lockers and laundry facilities for the apartment tenants. Apparently, when the apartment was built, in 1936, there were no houses immediately to the north so cars could access the garage easily. However, when houses were built, it was found that the property limit to the north only allowed for a small parking area that was not sufficiently wide for cars to turn into the garage. I wouldn't doubt that there were safety considerations as well. In the years that I lived across the hall from Marcelin and Roseline, Marcelin parked his VW minibus, that he had hand painted, in that parking spot (Fig. 1 - showing the roof of his minibus).
I have looked through my old photographs for pictures of Marcelin’s studio, but I don’t appear to have any. If cellphones had been a thing back then, I would probably have plenty. I have used PowerPoint in my attempt to draw a schematic of how I remember Marcelin’s studio (Fig. 2). There was one small window on the west side of the studio that provided some natural light and Marcelin had several lamps for additional illumination. He had a couch, a couple of chairs, some old carpets on the floor, and a space heater so the studio was quite comfortable.
When one sees photographs of painters in their studios, the studios are often a mess with canvases scattered around and paint everywhere. Marcelin’s studio was nothing like that. It was extremely neat, clean, and well organized. His paints, brushes, and pigments were all neatly arranged in his work area. Completed canvases were stored on the east side of the room and Marcelin could easily extract canvases for display either on the back side of his easel or against the north wall. The largest canvases were at the north end of the storage rack and smaller ones towards the south end. Furniture would be rearranged as required. The area in the north-east corner had an easy chair where Marcelin could relax and a table where he could sketch ideas for future works using pencil, ink, or water-colour paint or a combination. In this space, he also stored his steamer trunks that contained many of these sketches.
Marcelin used this studio space from July 1974 until he and Roseline moved into a new apartment in December 2015.
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