HOUSES: ANOTHER ART FORM

It’s time to move.

We bought this house five years ago. Our former house – a unique 1960 California contemporary where we’d lived for seven years (before that, a city townhouse and once, a 100-year old farm house) – was sold in a week. We moved into an apartment while we planned the “ultimate home for the mature couple.” It never got built and after living with rented furniture and even worse, rented artwork, we were ready to jump out our sixth floor window. Instead, we jumped here.

Once more we’ve poured ourselves into a house. It’s taken us five years of hard work – and more money, naturally – and now it is as close to perfection as I can make it and so, time to move on.

My best friend accuses me of self-sabotage. She claims that I can’t deal with success, that I manufacture reasons for turning perfection (whenever I get too close to whatever-that-is) into chaos and I wonder if she could be right.

I read somewhere once about achieving women who bore additional stress as they tried to keep up the face of success while, internally, feeling like an actor in someone else's play.

Do women feel like frauds most of the time? Is this the true curse of Eve?

Maybe Eve felt unworthy of all that perfection. Maybe she got tired of smiling and hosting all those garden tours while all the time thinking "this could be better. I can see the mistakes even if no one else can. I mean...poison ivy? How can I hide THAT one?"

But I prefer to believe that she looked around one day, dusted off her hands and said “There. It’s the best I can do with this place. Time for me to find a new challenge.”

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The lead photograph is our current Colorado contemporary house that is “for sale.” It’s pretty grand. Our plan is to buy a small something in Upstate New York for spring/summer.

We’ve already made a commitment to purchase a little cottage in North Carolina for the cold months. My ideal is this rustic cabin. I love the textures and the piecework look of the place. If anyone knows of such a place near here, send me the information.

Meanwhile, prepare for more house images - real and imagined - in my upcoming blogs. Here's one that I like: Christina Brinkman's charming sculptures. They look like toys. She does her own woodworking. The slab-formed houses are porcelain and she collects antique wheels from on-line auctions.

YES, BUT IS IT ART?

My daughter was in town this weekend. She ran away from her grown-up life – one husband, two children, goldfish, cat and turtle – and for 48 hours, pretended she was single again. Some of her old friends came over; they dressed all in black, put on their twenty-year old Doc Marten’s and went to a rock concert.

She reports that the 1980’s have not completely died in Rochester, there are still plenty of mullets around, and in this, her home town, the 1990’s is still a bit cutting edge.

I think she’s being a tad harsh. Or is that the role of generations - one just recently past idealism of youth and coming into the judgmental middle years and the other, rage, passion, crusading replaced with acceptance, introspection, joy in wabi sabi, the imperfection of the universe?

Like bats, my daughter and her friends begin their social circling after dark and so, during Saturday afternoon, I took her with me to the art gallery craft sale; it was nice (yawn) (sigh) (ho-hum) and spontaneously, we wandered into the main gallery to see “Pain of the Flesh" which is NOT y-s-ho-h but startling and vulgar and almost-but-not quite shocking. I liked it - it is NOT a holiday show.

My daughter was wearing her pre-concert-barhopping black garb including this hand painted jacket that she bought when she was in full-blown rebel mode in 1992 and living in Seattle. The museum guards began following her, talking to each other, nearly pointing, and when they saw that I was onto them, one of them said “her coat fits right into this show!”

We left the museum and drove to Main Street and the Scio Street garage to see the newly finished tile mosaic installation commissioned by the City, the work of artist Jill Gussow.

It’s colorful. Represents a ton of hours of work. It’s good… and decorative…and impossible not to like. But what if it was installed behind a kitchen stove or in a shower stall? Does the fact that it’s big, make it good? Does intricacy make it ingenious? Is this the best kind of public art – non-controversial?

I guess I can only ask the questions. I think my daughter’s jacket is repugnant and tasteless and I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing it. But it captures a certain spirit of its time and place. The murals are cheerful, colorful, fun. Do they tell us more about ourselves? Our place? Our time?Is this good public art or is it more lipstick on a pig?