All Parties End In The Kitchen

Wide view showing the entire kitchen mural.

This view orients toward the kitchen but here I wanted especially to show you the beautiful compass rose in the floor.

My Wadmalaw Island mural  project was one big mural or a set of four murals depending on how you look at it. Especially while working on it we had to think of it as four separate murals. 

Studio view. Our light there tended to be on the cool side as you can see.
Note the dividing line. There's a door between those two parts.

The first panel  is cut and waiting on the floor to be hung.

Alan Cooper and company hang the first panel. The kitchen portion of my mural.

The goal is always to have as few pieces as possible but there are actually more than four pieces owing to the interior architecture which includes single and double doorways. It doesn't make sense to include a blank space in the painting where a door would go. The sections of the mural above the doors were painted separately and so there are seams above the doors which are essentially invisible. Therefore the mural is one continuous unbroken picture plane of more than 140 feet.

My abstract corner. Channeling Clifford Still.

The mirrored door to the office open hides the corner and reflects more of the hall.

Another view of the corner and more of the kitchen wall reflected.

In truth it's all abstract to me. To paraphrase Magritte,  'This is not a landscape.'

 Oh, but don't get me started on the math. There's so much math to making a mural and I'm not crazy about that part. Or perhaps I should say it threatens to drive me crazy. 

Looking down the hall to the office. The kitchen is on the left.

One of my first assignments for my assistant, Christophe Cassidy,  was to tackle the math, to figure out the puzzle of all the pieces and how they fit on the stretched fabric. Of course we'd check and recheck each other's calculations and sometimes we'd have to remind ourselves what part of the project we were painting.

The low country.

Looking into the kitchen.

Half of the kitchen portion of my Wadmalaw Island mural.

Double doors to the kitchen.

 "All parties end up in the kitchen," Christophe would say to remind us that we were on the last part of the painting and it was indeed the kitchen. I think he was particularly excited to be in the home stretch (see photo).

Overlapping shots of the same area next to the kitchen double doors.

Same shot as above in perspective.

I love this sort of tangle of growth common to the wild parts of Wadmalaw.

Christophe jumping for joy. We're done!
This is a studio view and you'll note the break allowing for the double doors to the kitchen.

We're done but I'm not! Here I'm adding some painting over the door on site.
Work that would have been too difficult to match up in the studio.

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This is Living!

To the left is the waterfront. To the right is the main entrance to the house from the driveway.

In this post we've just stepped inside the door on the center left and will follow the walls indicated in red.

 Just one step inside the front door of the Wadmalaw Island house and you can see a lot. 

Looking from inside the guest room toward the door we've just entered from the driveway.

You see into the guest room on the right, through to the other side of the house straight ahead, and beyond the living room to the library on your left. And you can see some parts of all of my mural which I have divided into four main parts. In this post we will explore the living room portion.

During the installation.

Detail of living room portion, studio shot.

Looking into the living room.

Living room doors closed.

Part of the property that the house sits on is cultivated. So I depicted freshly plowed fields ready for planting and the natural forest bordering the field.

Looking from the hall through the living room and to the wall of the library.

This is a detail of the photo above. 

Wide shot showing the entire perimeter of the living room and all of this portion of my mural.

I didn't really think about it but there's poetic logic to the living room portion of my mural showing the land that gives life; food and a livelihood. 

Looking back through the open doors of the guest room. The living room is on the right.

Looking through the hall and into the living room from the library.

At the party given in honor of the craftspeople I met Robert and Lindsay MacLeod, Wadmalaw Island neighbors,  who are using part of this land to raise their own crops. They also happen to be the craftspeople who made the beautiful outdoor lanterns for the house. Coming up I'll show more of the outside as well as the kitchen portion of the mural. 

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The Library (not public)

The library is behind these walls. Here can see all of my library mural .

My flattened elevation showing me what I needed to paint.

The library is the upper left corner of this maquette.
Go here for more on the architect: http://www.rgkarchitects.com/

You, my readers, are not the public. Through me you have access to this private library. Actually we're going to concentrate on the outside of this library which is the third installment of my Wadmalaw mural entries.

Alan Cooper during installation.

Finished and close-up of sconce. Placement on the tree is purely coincidental.

My back in a studio shot.

First, a little more about the manner in which this project was conceived. As mentioned in my last post Glen Keyes' office sent me a beautiful set of plans and elevations but these I had to adapt for my own needs. What I needed were elevations which showed me the contiguous wall surfaces so I made them myself. Even better my good friend Alix Soubiran took these new elevations and made a simple paper model for me. Now I could really see what I was dealing with.

Looking into the library from the living room across the hall.

Outside the library and in.

Della works perfectly with my palette. That's a pink flamingo next to her.

Beyond the library walls there is water, the Wadmalaw Sound. Water, marsh, and a few trees that's the view in this direction. I placed a tree in the corner near the door to the library which has not leafed out. Somebody told me they thought my mural seemed to simultaneously depict all four seasons. That wasn't my intention but I like this idea. 

This is one of the largest stretches of fabric I had to paint. It wraps the corner here.

The waterside is through the closed doors.

There's cake on that table. Good cake.

What I had in mind was the time of day which is that in between time, close to sunset or sunrise. The light is low then and colors are muted. My rather neutral palette causes the mural to change it's complexion. The changing light in the hall is subtle and continuous which is partly why you see differences in my photos.

Studio shot of the other end of a long panel.

Same piece as above installed. Note there's an inner and outer corner.

The end.

This isn't the end. 

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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.


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