Wallpaper

A friend of mine has just had her house painted, new carpets laid, etc.  I went to see the final result, now that the workmen have left.  As I knew it would be, it is beautiful.  She's someone who knows about decorating, matching the right fabric with the right paint, choosing the right antiques, and the right piece of art to pull everything together.

I remember years ago when we were fixing up the little bedroom upstairs to use for guests.  After Ned painted the walls, I spent an afternoon decorating and when I stood at the door to survey my creation, I decided that the then hot-shot TV decorator Christopher Lowell could have stood at the door and thrown things into the room and have it look better than what I had lovingly created.

Sadly, decorating is another of those talents that I never acquired.

When I was growing up, we lived in a flat in San Francisco.  In the flat above us lived our landlord and landlady, Joe and Irma.  The thing I remember most about Irma is that she had a closet stuffed with dresses, noteworthy because when she found a dress she liked, she bought it in small, medium, and large, to accommodate her always fluctuating size.

The other thing I remembet about the two of them was that their front room, where they received guests was filled with overstuffed furniture, which was very comfortable but FILLED the room to where it was almost claustrophobic, and the walls were lined with photos.  I mean lined.  They belonged to a "thespian society" (at the time I was growing up, I thought that meant they acted in plays, but I suspect maybe they were a group of friends who attended plays) and all the photos were of the other members of the thespian society.

(This is a picture I found among my father's things.  Irma and Joe have Xs on them....and it's blurry because it was blurry to begin with.  But they must have had hundreds of these photos covering their walls, so that it was impossible to know what color the paint on the wall was because there was no space to see anything.)

I knew I would never have a house like Irma and Joe's.  My house would be tastefully decorated with lovely pieces of artwork.  To that end the very first thing we bought with the first check we received as a wedding gift was an etching of Beethoven that we saw in the window of an antique store one evening.  It hung over our piano for years.

Right before we moved to Davis, we attended an art sale.  It is the only one we have ever attended, I think, and was one of those deals where artists who crank out pictures quickly and sell them cheap exhibit their wares.  I don't know why we went to the sale, but as we turned a corner at the end of the row I saw "the painting."  We were about to move away from the San Francisco Bay Area, which I loved, to the flatland and this was the thing I wanted to take with me.  It's probably mass produced and it only cost $100 (I suspect the bulk of the cost was the frame), which was a terrible extravagance for us in 1973, but I loved it.

It takes up the entire wall on which it hangs and is way too big for the room, but I still love it and it still brings San Francisco back to me when I look at it.  For years it made me less homesick to look at it.

Next to this painting is the fireplace and on the opposite of the fireplace, we do have an nice groupings of Vanity Fair prints of Gilbert and Sulllivan.

I bought three of them and my friend Alison kindly gave me the fourth.  I love them too.  But that's about the extent of my tasteful decoration (you'll notice that Arthur Sullivan hangs at a rakish angle, which I would have straighted before taking the photo if it hadn't been 1 a.m. when I took it and I would have had to move boxes and probably knocked the picture to the floor trying to fix it!)

I do have a nice grouping, a salute to Peet's coffee, though it is hardly great art....a poster I found at Peet's, in a Long Drug Store frame, a nice print of the SF Chronicle and a cup of coffee, and an article about Peet's that I tore out of a Sunday magazine.

When the kids were performing, the walls looked more like Irma and Joe's walls.  We had theatre pictures everywhere.  Now we just have the Lawsuit wall which remains.

It's a nice wall to use for a nice grouping of lovely art prints, but, I dunno...I like remembering the Lawsuit days and I suppose I'll never change the pictures that hang on it.

There is a part of me which wishes I could have the home that my friend does, tastefully decorated with lovely art pieces, but I guess that's not my personality.  All the things hanging on our walls mean something to me, and if they aren't exactly anything anybody would consider works of art, well...we rarely have guests anyway...

Mom's Refrigerator Door

Our refrigerator door is covered with magnets now. I usually pick up one or two whenever we travel (which means that my refrigerator door is now full of magnets. Many of the lower ones have become teething toys for dogs, so I try to make sure that the special ones are kept toward the top, out of dog range.

I love the latest one I got in Washington.

I actually had purchased a couple of postcards at the Newseum to send through the Postcrossing project. It became an instant favorite and I even had an e-mail from a guy in China asking if I could send him one of the postcards (fortunately I had bought 3 of them). I was thrilled when I found the postcard on a magnet because I loved the idea. I wonder if they ever designed a postcard like this before we had an African-American president...

As much as I enjoy the magnets, I think I prefer the days when the refrigerator was a place to display the kids' latest art work. We have a side-by-side now and I don't know if school artwork would fit, but back then we had a regular refrigerator with a freezer compartment above and so there was lots of uninterrupted blank space to display artwork.

For years there was a rotating display of art from each of the kids. When they got too old to have work to display, Jeri went off to college to study theatre design. When she completed her masters degree at UCD she brought home a rolled up piece of canvas on which was painted part of a backdrop for a show she had designed. She told me I didn't have to post it on the refrigerator door (good thing, since I would have had to wrap the refrigerator in it, it was so big!)

But now it appears we are entering a new era. Walt recently spent several days in Santa Barbara visiting his mother, while his sister and her husband are taking a short vacation. He had meals at Tom and Laurel's several times and he brought home this finger painting by Bri for me.

I'm not sure where I'm going to put it, since it's too wide for the refrigerator door, but I'm glad that I can scan it and post it here (even if it's too wide for my scanner to capture all of it.

I think it displays a remarkable artistic sense. First, paint takes over its shallow space. It gets denser, the painting's symmetry gets more obvious, and the technique gets varied and absorbing.

(OK...that was from a review of a Jackson Pollock painting, but just look at Bri's. It applies, right?)

I can hardly wait to start removing some of my magnets and replacing them with Bri-designed art work.

The Artist as a young girl

"Art"

Walt and I haven't been to London together in several years, but we have visited that city enough times that I almost feel comfortable wandering around town, knowing approximately where I am in the busy parts and how to get where I want to go.

London is our town of "splurge." We splurge on theatre. We always have a theatre orgy when there, seeing a play a night. There may be one or two plays that we want to see and are willing to pay high prices for (we saw Lion King for the first time in London and also managed to get tickets for the very popular Sunset Blvd because Betty Buckley, who was playing Norma Desmond, had taken a few days off and so we saw her understudy (thus tickets were easier to get).

Usually, however, we go to Leicester Square, where there is a low-cost ticket booth, like TKTS in Times Square in New York. We buy whatever sounds good or, in some cases, kind of a pig in a poke. I remember once I had seen that Derek Jacobi was appearing in a play and we were able to find tickets at the booth in Leicester Square. (Ironically, the people sitting directly behind us at that performance were friends from The Lamplighters in San Francisco -- we didn't even know they were traveling, nor did they know that we were in London).

We've seen some traditional British comedies just because there were tickets available for half price in Leicester Square. We happened to see Anthony Hopkins in M. Butterfly because Walt was able to get tickets at Leicester Square. (We've also seen a couple of real dogs as well, but that's part of the experience.)

But perhaps the best Leicester Square ticket was for the only show that happened to have a Sunday matinee. We were faced with amusing ourselves or going to see a production of the playArt, which I knew almost nothing about, other than that it had a rotating cast and the "name" star for the show currently running in London was Judd Hirsch. It turned out to be my favorite play of all we had seen on that trip.

The plot sounds kind of silly. It's a cast of three. The main character, Hirsch, has purchased a painting that he is thrilled about. It has cost him a very large sum of money and he invites his friends to see the huge painting which, when it is revealed is a white canvas. All white. Hirsch raves and raves about how much it means to him and his friends try to point out what a dumb painting it is. Somehow this keeps your interest over two acts and at the end, when the light shifts to focus on the painting, on a mostly darkened stage, it takes your breath away. You suddenly see what Hirsch's character saw in the painting. It's nothing you can describe; you have to experience it. I could not believe how moved I was by it.

The play pretty much explains my relationship with art. I'm one of those people who knows what I like, but can't tell you why. I might like a Van Gogh as much as the painting of a decanter of wine and a glass, which sits on my mother's wall, and which was painted by a neighbor many years ago. I can't tell you why I like the things that I like. I liked Thomas Kincaide before he became the Carolyn Keene of the art world (she was the supposed author of the Nancy Drew mystery books, but was really a whole bunch of writers mass produced books under that name). What I liked in his paintings was how he handled light...which made me a real sucker for the old Dutch masters and the beautiful contrast between light and dark in their paintings (especially when seen up close and personal)

Basically, I don't understand "art" and don't know what to look for, I just know what I like, but I can be transported away by beautiful sea scapes, transfixed by most of the Impressionists, and even mesmerized by the big eyes of Keane paintings.

One of my very favorite art experiences was touring the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam. Van Gogh is the only artist I've ever "studied" (as much as I study anything) and had read books about him and actually knew what I was looking at when I took the tour of all the paintings.

I often wish I could discuss "art" in some sort of intelligent manner, but basically I just like pretty pictures, or pictures that move me, or pictures that make me smile.

I suppose that that's better than nothing!

Ramon

What's the old saying...? "I don't know art, but I know what I like."

I love going to people's homes and seeing "art" hanging on the walls in tasteful combinations. We don't have "art" here. We have photos of the kids, photos of dogs, old Lawsuit posters, pictures of Judy Garland and a couple of things that could loosely be called "art." I have no walls for "art," no knowledge of what to buy, no sense of home decoration, and no money even if I did.

I was lying on the couch this morning, as I woke up, looking at a somewhat small framed lithograph of Beethoven that hangs over our piano. It was our very first wedding present. Nobody actually gave us a picture of Beethoven, but our first gift was a check and that night we walked past a store that displayed the picture in the window. I told Walt I wanted to buy it as our first wedding gift.

We've added a very few pieces of "art" to the house since then. We have a set of four Vanity Fair prints that I bought during the height of our Gilbert & Sullivan involvement. They are of Gilbert, Sullivan, Richard D'Oyly Carte (their producer) and George Grosmith (the first patterman). Actually I bought 2 or 3 of them and my wonderful friend Alison filled out the set, which was incredibly generous of her. And when Peggy was here she bought me a lovely little Thomas Kincade painting at a Kincade gallery when we were on an island in Puget Sound with our friend Diane (she bought one for Diane too).

Just before we moved here to Davis, Walt and I went to one of those huge art warehouses where you can buy large size mass produced art for your office or house. Not "art" in the Van Gogh / Rembrandt / Picasso kinda way, but "art" in that someone put paint to canvas and painted it, whether any art critic would ever give it high marks or not. The kind of art that that soft-speaking guy used to make in a half an hour on public television back before he died.

At the end of a long aisle of floral arrangements and dogs playing cards and sea scapes I saw the painting at the left. I fell in love with it. I think it cost the whopping sum of $125 (which to us was a whopping amount for something as frivolous as a painting I already knew I had no room for). It is meant for a large room and what you see there is just about the entire width between the fireplace and the wall and 3/4 of the height of the wall. But I was leaving my beloved Bay Area and desperately wanted this. When I miss San Francisco, all I have to do is lie on the couch, put my feet up and look at the painting. I still love it.

And then there's Ramon's Wife and Daughter.

We met "Ramon" at a silent auction that Tiny Tots nursery school was having as a fund raiser. Someone had donated the untitled painting that, as I remember, was mostly a dark background with an Hispanic man painted on it and "Ramon" as the painter's signature.

Char's husband Mike bid on the painting and won it. We had many laughs over "Ramon" over the years (I wonder where it is now....). We made up stories about him and how the painting had come to be painted. We thought of using him as a dart board.

In 1986, my friend Gilbert died and I ended up in possession of the contents of his house. I distributed a lot of his things to his friends, but I ended up bringing home a huge painting that had hung in his living room. It wasn't a particularly good painting and he and I had never discussed it. But he was a man who knew things about art and I always assumed he'd purchased it. We hung it on the landing of our stairs (the only wall big enough to hold it) and, when Char saw it, she decided it was Ramon's wife and daughter. So we've always called it Ramon's wife and daughter.

Some years after Gilbert died I found out --I don't know how-- that the painting had been painted by a mutual Lamplighter friend, who had spent some time in Mexico. She contacted me and told me that she would be happy to take the painting off my hands, but by then I had gotten used to having "Ramon's wife and daughter" hanging around and I told her that I'd like to keep it. I promised to give it to her if I ever wanted to get rid of it.

I have long since lost her contact information (and would have to probe the depths of my memory banks to remember which Lamplighter person it was, actually), but I still have a kind of fondness for Ramon's Wife and Daughter.

So we don't collect high fallutin' "art," but what we have all has special meaning for us ... and that's probably what artists have in mind in the first place.

Making a Good "Impression"

I took the "What Your Taste in Art Says About you Test" which Jim wrote about in a recent journal entry. Jim and I actually got the same result...

Your result for What Your Taste in Art Says About You Test...

Balanced, Secure, and Realistic.

Impressionism is a movement in French painting, sometimes called optical realism because of its almost scientific interest in the actual visual experience and effect of light and movement on appearance of objects. Impressionist paintings are balanced, use colored shadows, use pure color, broken brushstrokes, thick paint, and scenes from everyday life or nature.

People that like Impressionist paintings may not alway be what is deemed socially acceptable. They tend to move on their own path without always worrying that it may be offensive to others. They value friendships but because they also value honesty tend to have a few really good friends. They do not, however, like people that are rude and do not appreciate the ideas of others. They are secure enough in themselves that they can listen to the ideas of other people without it affecting their own final decisions. The world for them is not black and white but more in shades of grey and muted colors. They like things to be aestically pleasing, not stark and sharp. There are many ways to view things, and the impresssionist personality views the world from many different aspects. They enjoy life and try to keep a realistic viewpoint of things, but are not very open to new experiences. If they are content in their live they will be more than likely pleased to keep things just the way they are.

Take What Your Taste in Art Says About You Test at HelloQuizzy

I actually knew before I took this test how I would score. I wouldn't say I was a huge art lover, but the things that I like I really like.

Sometime in the 1960s, I became aware of Van Gogh and, as with things that interest me, I became obsessed with reading all I could, seeing all I could and absorbing everything I could about his life and his art. When an exhibit came through San Francisco, Walt and I went to see it. I was blown away seeing some of the paintings in real life, especially Starry Night which was SO much bigger and more vivid than I ever imagined.

But I found that with all the bold and famous Van Gogh paintings, the one that took my breath away was the simple "Almond Blossom"

Gilbert surprised me with tickets to an Impressionist exhibit in San Francisco in 1985 or 86. I was introduced to so many different painters, and I reveled in the exhibit. I don't think I was aware of Mary Cassatt, before, for example, and I loved her Mother/child paintings.

Several years later, when I was living in D.C. for six weeks, I visited the Phillips Gallery, a small gallery near Dupont Circle (where I worked). They had a small, but lovely collection of impressionistic paintings, including Renoir's "The Boating Party"

A picture this small can't possibly begin to do it justice. Nor can small pictures do justice to any of these magnificent paintings.

My crowning joy (so far) was visiting the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, where the exhibit goes chronologically and you can follow the development of his technique from the dark days of "The Potato Eaters"...

...through the insanity so brilliantly expressed in "A Starry Night."

As I started to write this, it had been my intent to mention other artists that fill my soul with joy or awe when I see their paintings, but obviously my first love is the Impressionists. So, as I said, the result of this little quiz doesn't surprise me in the least. But I'm always open to exploring new genres, learning about new (to me) artists, and enjoying the work of the old masters. (The use of light in the old Dutch Masters is something that can't possibly be appreciated in a print, but must be seen to be understood.)

Hey...maybe I'm more of an art lover than I realized...

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Tomorrow is Cousins Day (finally!), so the next entry will be posted late.