Be My Guest

Ask me.

The house floor plan. The guest room is in the upper right and outlined in red.

You may refer back to this plan as you look through my photos of the guest room.

We'll start near the single door, round the corner, and end up on the other side of the double doors.

This is elevation from Glenn Keyes' office showing one guest room wall, the door to the driveway, and one living room wall.  I kept staring at this until the light bulb went off over my head. I had to rip this apart and create my own elevations.
http://www.rgkarchitects.com/

My Wadmalaw Island mural is quite large so to design and paint it meant breaking it down into manageable pieces. The floor plan is simple. It's this: +.  A plus sign you might say. Simple right? Yes, of course, but there's more to it than that and anyway I'm more concerned with the elevations since that's where my mural comes in. What I soon realized was that the beautiful elevations sent to me were not quite what I needed so I reconfigured them to conform to the four quadrants of the house and named them for the rooms they defined: kitchen, guest, living, and library.

That's me in the studio with my (long handled) Whistler brush.
My assistant, Christophe Cassidy, brought in a music stand which held my sketch. See it?

The installer, Alan Cooper, and his crew at work on the guest room panel.

 It was decided from the outset that the surrounding countryside would be the subject of the mural. I've been to Charleston and the area a number of times and have painted it too so this was familiar to me. The interior designer, Amelia Handegan, suggested I use the work of Alice Ravenel Huger Smith (1876-1958), as inspiration. I love Ms. Smith's work because she shows a strong sense of the abstract which goes beyond merely recorded information. And her work is beautiful. You can't argue with that.

The abstract corner. These out of the way places are some of my most favorite.

The abstract corner is behind the opened mirrored door.

Shells in the woods. Well remember, we are near the water. It's all around us here.

The small door on the left leads to the guest room.

The opposite corner far right is the living room.

The clients sent me a cache of photos taken on their property. There were a lot to choose from, some water views, fields plowed for cultivation, marshes, and wooded areas. So what shall we concentrate on? "What would you like to see", I asked.  A little of everything they told me. So here's how I approached it: if you stood in the middle of the house and could look through the walls what would you see. That's basically how I composed the mural and used each room to represent a different aspect of the low country property.

Turning the corner.

The other side of the guest room.

The pocket doors closed to the guest room.

The opposite corner is the kitchen wall. And that's Della on the floor.

The land beyond the guest room walls is wooded and canopied with foliage. The trees are beautiful but all the other views have sky above so how could I use this view and maintain a consistent palette and values? I decided to render the forest view as if it were a misty morning with the upper story dissolving into fog. Solving  this design dilemma was the beginning for me so here in this post I present the atmospheric and ethereal "guest room" mural, one of four.

Looking into the guest through the double doors.

Details of another abstract corner. Channeling Alice Smith.

Stick with me. we're only about one quarter of the way through this project. And please remember: click on any picture to enlarge. You'll get a much better view. Next up: the library.


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

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?