Island Party

Come with me, you're my date. I'm taking you to a party and you will love it. It's down a lonely road in the low country of South Carolina. We've left Charleston. We're going over the Esau Jenkins Bridge, under a canopy of old oaks, passed truck farms and down a dirt road you could easily miss if I weren't at the wheel.

At last we see it and it looks new but is this a new house? Could be a restored Antebellum.  There are people on the porch, oh good, we're not the first to arrive. OK, let's go in. Wow, beautiful. Go on, I'm going to explore on my own. This doesn't seem to be a party where everyone congregates in the kitchen. But look there are just four rooms and this giant hallway that cuts through from front to back and side to side.

Waterside porch through the doors on the left and the library on the right.

Ok, true confessions: I've been here before, just once. I painted the mural that lines the hallway. The mural was created in California but I came for the installation and now I am back for a party given by the owners in celebration of the craftspeople who put this house together. In future posts I'm going to thoroughly explore this space to show you all of my mural. I'll take you back to the studio to show you the painting process and even further back to the planning stages.

Looking into the living room and the guest room down the hall.

View from inside the library looking across the hall to the living room.

Just outside the kitchen seen through the doorway on the right.

The library is behind the wall on the immediate left and the kitchen is straight ahead.

The view from the living room into the hallway and the library beyond.

Looking into the living room.

Now don't go away blog readers. This should be interesting.

Click on Tumblr for more pictures of this and other projects. Thanks!

Melrose Project

Detail of "110"

My painting titled "110" from 2005.
ink, watercolor, gouache on rag paper 11" x 15"

Another number for a title. This one's "134" done in 2006.
ink, watercolor, gouache on rag paper 11" x 15"

My trip to the South was Saturday through Saturday and shortly after my plane touched down back in California one of my agents, Joanna Burke, called, then dropped by my studio to pick up a couple of my works for an installation. 

On the left my works installed at the PDC.
On the right, a shot taken from The Melrose Project looking toward the PDC.

The entry space at The Melrose Project. Just look at the scale of the rug and that table.  Marvelous.

There's something called West Week going on in L.A. which is a brouhaha meant to goose the PDC. Showrooms have cocktail parties and such but I have to tell you it was across the street at a venue named The Melrose Project where it was happening. 

Chic to Chic designer crowd at The Melrose Project.

This was just last night and despite our unseasonably cold and rainy weather the design cognoscenti dressed up and turned out to see and be seen.

Just look at that amazing marquetry and the painted chest!

Love that anthropomorphic table and the outrageous Baroque mirror.

Ok, here's something I really liked at the PDC. The pair of cast stone benches.
My garden would love those.
The planting on the right is actually next to The Melrose Project.
It's a garden design by Judy Kameon.

If I didn't meet you there last night please, won't you leave a comment just to say hello? 

Spring Forward Fall Back

Pensive bust at the High Museum, Atlanta

 Does daylight savings time count if your outside you're time zone when it kicks in?  It does and the ricochet effect of flying back and forth across the country and back to a place where for me it all began is a little discombobulating.

3100 Andrews Drive, the place of my grisaille foyer mural.
This helicopter view shows the back of the house and guest house.

Look! I found the house I was looking for (in my last blogpost).

Atlanta was snowing in white blossoms.

I have so much new  material for Corbu's Cave from my trips to Atlanta, Charleston, and Wadmalaw but it will have to wait. So here's a mini post with just a few choice pix.  

Atlanta's midtown towers from the Botanical Garden.

In My Father's House Are Many Mansions
Detail view of a Howard Fenster at the High, Atlanta.

Outside the High Museum of Art.

Somewhere in Charleston.

Time and Space

That's me at the front door. A J. Neel Reid house.

 I just flew low over Atlanta, (via Google Earth), trying to find a house I want to show you. It's a Neel Reid house. A brilliant classicist, Neel Reid, is well known to the landed gentry of Atlanta.  I was fortunate to have the opportunity to paint a mural there in 1983 or was it 1984?  Doesn't matter, the point is I've got some rather  shocking images to show you!  Of course the photographs are probably shocking only to me because I can hardly identify what I know to be pictures of me. What was I thinking with those big thick socks and hot pants? Tell me! Fortunately I think the painting I'm doing is not so bad. It was my version of the Chinoiserie in the The Long Gallery at the Royal Pavilion at Brighton. I remember at the time I was so into the Brighton Pavilion. Of course you probably know the Pavilion was built by the Prince Regent whose father was mad King George. Atlanta loves, loves Regency so apparently it rubbed off on me.

Me painting with spectators

I seemed to always be on a ladder

Part of my finished work circa 1984

So why drudge up this ancient history? I guess it's on my mind because I'll soon be paying a visit to Atlanta. Family will be there and possibly some more painting for me too. Don't worry I promise to keep you in the loop.

P.s. If you're still interested I've got a few other posts about Atlanta:

Pompeiian Model

Trompe l'Oeil

Fox Theater

The Ponce

More here:


Neel Reid House

  

http://corbuscave.blogspot.com/2011/03/spring-forward-fall-back.html

See Food

(Please click on photos to enlarge.)

Hanks Seafood, Charleston. My frieze is in here!

I just finished reading Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution by Thomas Mc Namee. It came out a few years ago but my sister just gave it to me for my birthday recently and I ate it up like a scrumptious clafoutis.

studio view

studio view

The first time I visited San Francisco as an adult I offered to take my host to dinner toward the end of my stay. "Anywhere" I said. As luck would have it we grabbed a reservation within just about 24 hours. The normal time lag for garnering a table at Chez Panisse is often a month or months but I was blithely unaware. The specialness of Chez Panisse was unknown to me. This was 1988. Since then I've been there more times than I can remember so it should be apparent that I "got it".

My frieze installed

Now anyone who visits a good restaurant in the U.S. is likely benefiting to some degree from the Chez Panisse effect. Charleston, South Carolina has become something of a foodie town. (Alice does not approve of that term: foodie. I like it fine.) There are so many good restaurants there and I'm happy to have my work in a couple of them. When I painted the frieze for Hanks Seafood I was definitely thinking of food, good food. My palette was meant to suggest freshly boiled lobster, raw oysters, creamy seafood bisque, you know, yummy.

Hanks interior showing my frieze.

Hanks interior showing my frieze.

Hanks Seafood waiters waiting to serve you.

I had some fun painting the frieze and it was sort of a surprise to me. I assemble the ingredients: the imagery, the palette, and the materials and just started painting with no preparatory sketches. I think this is sort of the way Alice works. You take really good ingredients and put them together without a lot of fuss. I followed that other Waters dictate too: use local. The background imagery comes from sea charts of the low country and many of the fish depicted are served in the restaurant.

Have you eaten yet?

Ready For My Close-Up

Ready For My Close-Up

 I saw Nixon in China today. It was a live broadcast from the New York Metropolitan Opera at Frank Sinatra Hall, USC. No doubt it is thrilling in person but the close-ups we got were amazing and I'm sure much more than those in NYC could see even front row center. Peter Sellars himself directed the broadcast and he seemed to have a number of flying cameras at his disposal.

But I digress because this post isn't about opera or Adams but Chase as in Linda Chase. Of course I'm in this too. I'll be your mirror, reflect who you are, in case you don't know. Linda Chase is one of the most chic decorators I've never met. Well, we've met on the phone but really we should meet in person. I know I'm ready for my close-up (look) at Nu-Vignette, Linda's new chic little shop in Summerland.

Linda has a number of my mirror images at Nu-Vingnette and she sent me close-ups (photos) taken in the shop which should whet your appetite for seeing the real thing. If Summerland's too long a drive from where you are go to Amazon or some other bookseller and order Linda's fabulous book on Beidermeier. Yes, she wears a lot of hats. Hats are back, you know?

Is That All There Is?

Is That All There Is?

If that's all there is my friends, then let's keep dancing.

I guess in my case that would be keep painting, although, dancing may well serve as a metaphor for painting or whatever it is you have to do. I think I may have mentioned somewhere in this blog that when I was in art school I avoided painting. It seemed done, effete.

Someone should have told me, yes it's done, it's effete now keep doing it. Of course that could have been me. I could have told myself.

Look at these ridiculous paintings. I can't tell you much about them. They're my copies of some sort of primitive, itinerant, outsider artist's works which I created for a client of Amelia Handegan's. (I'm told they will be installed soon.)

Are they 19th century? 18th? I don't know. Whatever the reference they are now 21st century paintings and they have that kind of exuberance and playfulness that we can't help being attracted to.

Scott Waterman's studio.

Know what I mean?