What’s the art of balancing work and family? From their home in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, married artists Daniel Gordon and Ruby Sky Stiler candidly discuss the complex professional and personal dynamics of bringing a baby into their already busy lives. Gordon’s and Stiler’s studios are a study in contrasts. Gordon’s studio in DUMBO is overflowing with color and materials, the floor strewn with paper scraps from which he creates elaborate still lifes to photograph. Stiler’s studio in Gownaus is more orderly, her work table a puzzle of Styrofoam shards from which she constructs sculptures and casts elegant bas-reliefs referencing antiquity. Gordon and Stiler met in graduate school and, like many hard-working professionals in their thirties, the decision to have a baby was a difficult leap into the unknown.

For Stiler, the transition from taking care of baby Gus to working in the studio was trying: feelings of satisfaction at going back to work hit up against feelings of guilt at not being at home with her newborn. For Gordon, life after the baby meant learning how to maximize his studio time within a set 9 to 5 schedule, while home became an unexpected release from the burdens of art. “Now having Gus, it’s such a pleasure and a relief to have some other thing that’s very important that pulls you away from all that stuff and pulls you away from your head,” says Gordon. “You can’t obsess and take care of Gus. You have to obsess about Gus, and then you can obsess about the other stuff.”