Modern Artworks

Long time with no posts. Excuses aside, it's been a crazy month, I'm now unemployed, and I should have plenty more time to post more regularly. Upcoming posts will feature 'MCM furniture finds', the concrete front porch I poured out front, the complete bathroom remodel we recently completed, and the lurking studio remodel that's currently gutted and in need of a new roof. I thought it might be nice to switch it up a bit and explore the various pieces of MCM art we've acquired and one we made over the past year.

Our first introduction to Mid Century Art was simple, Charlie Harper. As soon as we realized our modern furniture collection was just the beginning in our house, I bought our first Charlie Harper print, Praying Mantis 2, for Wendy's birthday in 2005. After collecting several of his prints we realized we needed to expand our horizons, though I'd be perfectly fine with only Harpers in the house. The first piece, 'Laguna Aurora' is a serigraph I bought at a local auction house downtown. I walked by this place daily and this print jumped off the wall of artwork at me. The print is 10/60 and the artist's name I still have yet to identify. It's either 'Deinstag' or 'Dreustag', but the cursive signature is not legible. Anyone have any ideas? The colors on this and graphic simplicity currently make this my favorite piece in our house.

The second piece I picked up recently is this small oil on canvas painting. It looks as if it was a college students work with the self made frame. The frame is painted wood very rougly nailed to the stretched canvas. Obviously, we veer towards abstract graphical type of work. We also like sculptural objects, we were overwhelmed by tedious repetition at the recent Tara Donovan exhibit at the Contemporary Arts Center downtown. Nonetheless this piece is signed 'Robert Walder or Walden', November 1971 on the back, so period appropriate. I actually found an artist in NYC Robert Walden Jr. who suggested it might be his father's work, but it ended up not being his work after a few emails. I'm still in the dark on this artist, but the piece works great adjacent to the front two toned grey wall, the colors are almost exact.

The final piece is a recent installation Wendy and I came up with while cleaning out the office for demolition. The piece is simply two weathered copper panels juxtaposed on a seafoam colored wall that anchors one end of our large dining / living space. Daily, the sun caresses an array of reflection and color off the pieces. Quite often at dinner I find myself seeing a beach wave crash to shore or a mountain range lurking through the mist. It often inspires a dinner discussion, there's always a different interpretation by different people.

The humorous part is I almost took these panels to the metal scrapyard to be cashed in for their weight. These use to be orchid trays filled with gravel, and over the years the bottoms oxidized slightly and created the complex visual seen in the closeup. When I was cleaning them out and hosing them off outside, the weathered underside of them was discovered. After several mock-up configurations, including a couple angular and vertical ideas, we decided to let the sloped ceiling counter the horizontal shift of the two panels. Viola, trash turned to treasure.

Layers of History - Transitions

It nevers ceases to amaze me how many layers of materials have been put into, and onto, our 56 year old house. There are a numerous variety of materials used for flooring throughout our home, many indicative of the 50's era. In the front entry is green flagstone, adjacent to the grey tiled powder room. The wood flooring is prevalent throughout most of the first floor. The kitchen has 2-3 layers of vinyl flooring, which we plan to replace with cork when we remodel the kitchen.

The upstairs studio (currently in demoltion process) has maroon vct tile as can be seen in the first photo. We originally discovered the vct tile when demolitioning for the bedroom redo. It looks to be the asbestos type, commonly it was made in the 9x9 size we have. The 2nd photo is of the first step upstairs. This was carpeted and removed in our entry overhall. It revealed the original hardwood finish, and a couple of the main colors the house was originally painted, as can be seen in the third photo. This allowed us to match the greenish gray that we eventually painted our dining wall. We intend to redo the entire upstairs hardwood floor at some point to match the original on the stairs.

Downstairs, adjacent to the vct bedroom the hallway has a darker, possibly walnut, hardwood floor. The 4th photo is the transition between Ava's room and the hallway with the hardwood adjacent to the Ikea flooring we put in over the VCT tile. This hardwood extends the run of the hallway in the lower level and continues into the master bedroom. Unfortunately, the hardwood is in pretty rough shape. There are several water damaged areas, and several irregularly leveled areas. I've never dealt with hardwood flooring installation, repair, or refinishing before so this one will be left to the professional. We may just recarpet over it.

The last photo is the dark hardwood at the new bathroom threshold. The bathroom project is a topic for a later post, but in a nutshell, we redid the whole room over the course of 14 months. The flooring is hardipanel smooth cement board, along with the walls and ceiling. I was able to install the cement board flush with the original hardwood in case we are able to save it.

I have removed all the Gened up baseboard trim in the downstairs hallway and revealed a lot of plaster damage. We have yet to install any thresholds downstairs yet until we fix these plaster issues and really tackle the hallway as an individual project. We may just add a layer (to the layers of history) of homasote over the existing plaster which would allow me to avoid any more trim installation. So many modern remodeling plans, so little time.

Bedroom Redo #1

The very first time we looked at our house as it sat vacant we could see the ceiling of the 3rd bedroom was on floor from water damage. This was pretty much the only thing we could see in the house with the blinds all down. I remember telling Wendy, "this isn't going to work". The next time I saw this room was when the neighbors gave us a heads up that "Gene" was in town and working on the house. We drove over and had our first chat with Gene, he was mowing the lawn.

Our conversation went something like:

Us: "Hey, cool house, do you wanna sell it?"

Gene: "Umm its not ready to sell."

Us: "It was on the market a year ago, and has sat vacant ever since"

Gene: "Umm yeah, I don't live here any more"

Us: "Can we have a tour?"

The tour revealed a few things that were mysterious from only an exterior view. One, the house had been Gene's personal ashtray since he'd been back. Two, the reasoning for the low windows in front is because of the stairs. Finally, the reason the ceiling was on the floor in said bedroom is because Gene didn't install the refrigerator icemaker water line correctly in the kitchen above. In its year of vacancy, this leak led to the collapsed ceiling. At the time of our tour, Gene was "gene-ing-it-up" smattering layers of drywall and mud into the irregular collapse. It was a mess.

Fast forward to us living in the house for 8 months, a baby due in two months and we're using the only livable bedroom of three. Beyond Gene's icemaker madness, we also discovered a downspout leak unknown to us. The cat alerted me to it when he was messing with the bubbly plaster by the side window. Basically the water was draining down the brick instead of the downspout. Ten contractor bags of demolition later, I had removed the rot. Our house has no insulation, the exterior walls are built of brick, then 4" block, furring, and plaster.

To make a boring story short, we infilled the wall with a little drywall & actual plaster and replaced part of the over the course of a couple weeks with the help of my uncle, a plaster craftsman. We installed some Ikea flooring, replaced all the trim, closet shelving, and painted the room white. We bought the white Izaac Mizrahi Target furniture on the clearance cheap (2 nightstands, 2 dressers), who knows it might be a collectible item in 30 years. I made the bed in college. We hung the Charlie Harper 'Skipping School' print and called it a wrap. After all was said and done, we actually got two nights to sleep in our new room before Ava was born.

Entry Modification Phase 2

The next phase of our entry modification became more renovation as we discovered damaged plaster across the front wall. We came across this after we removed the slat blinds and hardware to give this front wall a more minimal aesthetic. The horizontal windows are recessed from the main wall plane about 1-1/2" that sets the windows in another frame of plaster. A simple peeling of some loose plaster turned into dry chunks falling from the wall. Before we knew it we had begun an unexpected project.

We have single pane metal casement windows througout our house, very typical of the Dombars and Mid Century Moderns. The front entry area of the house tends to get extremely cold and drafty which leads to lots of condensation. The plaster has suffered much of this weathering and needed a major overall. Although hard to see in the photo, there were several cracks and damaged outside corners of the windows heads. Much of the surface of the wall was wavering and in pretty rough shape.

The process involved taping, mudding, filling all the voids, and skim coating the whole wall. Plaster work was generally new to me having mostly drywall experience on simple flat walls. The inside corners and window jambs proved to be a challenge. We quarantined the entire stairwell in plastic to isolate the dust. It probably took me about two weeks to really get to the point of priming.

The third photo shows the final cleaned up plaster result. I think we had primed a couple coats at this point. Our 1/2 bath upstairs is adjacent to the entry and we also removed wallpaper and skim coated the 'wallpaper reveal' in that room as part of this project. Obviously, the AC in the window is an eyesore but was a necessary evil for us to have cooling. It's position in the stairwell really kept the house comfortable in the heat of the summer. Eventually it would go and be glazed, to be shown in a future post.

While subtle, I thought the recessed window condition could be expressed with a contrasting color. We decided on a dark grey for the inner color and a cool light grey for the outer. The light grey continues into the bathroom (after we removed all the wall paper) and into the downstairs. We kinda had a major painting spree at this point and painted our dining room wall a lime green. The three colors had a nice balance and added a dynamic to our space that helped us feel more at home. We had been in the house for 4 months at this point. The last photo is us 'settled in' post painting.

Entry Modification Phase 1

Considering the amount of money renovating an old house can gobble up, it was to our benefit most of our initial projects were purge based. Beige carpet lined the entry, office, stairs and the entire lower level. Victorian wallpaper lined the walls of the upstairs bathroom and office while metallic gold curtains lined the windows. Aqua colored Plexiglass detailed lights and ceiling fans paired with bronze hardware portrayed and interesting moment in time (1984 I think) where these things were actually considered 'style'. Gened mangled and half-assed most of his efforts here. Whether it be an electrically taped wire connection, a countertop just sitting on cabinetry by its own weight, or spray paint marblized wall paper, not much became a suprise after a few months.

One of our first interventions was to remove the carpet and part of the railing in the entry space. The glass block railing w/ carpet in the picture is how we first moved in. The entry area features a unique green stone (still unidentified formally) as seen in the pictures, the fireplace hearth also has the same stone. Peeling up the edge of the carpet revealed the hardwood floor to continue to the entry stone from the main space. The wood floor underneath has some damage and expanded joints that will need to be patched up when we redo the whole floor at some point. Obviously the glass block isn't original and tacky, it was gratifying to knock over the small portion with a swift kick. The railing for the lower level steps we believe to be original, a minimal black pipe ship rail style railing, very MCM.

 

I can't remember how many staples Wendy and I pulled up for hours, someone had gotten staple happy when they installed the carpet. Only three small hole had been drilled into the stone and we were able to clean up the leftover mortar to acheive the final photo. Although at the time we enjoyed the openess and lack of enclosure around the steps, we eventually would put

in a new railing (for a future post) that matched the lower

level. You can see a bit of it in the last photo.

CF3 Coffee Chat - Alexander Residence

Last weekend we decided to get the whole family out of the house and went to check out the CF3 coffee chat event. The featured home was that of the late Jim Alexander, an architecture professor at UC's DAAP and a practitioner. The house was built in 1949 and is located on a unknown road in the outback of Wyoming. Several other moderns dot the street including one I spent two years working on. Most of the street includes very hill driven lots that offer great views of the outerlying valley. Wendy, Ava, and Ashton stand for their photo op in front of the carport.

On first approach the house seems much smaller than it actually is. It follows the terrain and linearly extends from the approach. One enters the house by descending into the entry courtyard, overhead a trellis structure connects the carport to the main house. The overall composition consists of several interlocking volumes, anchored by the larger two story 'original house'.

Over time this was added onto by subsequent kitchen, dining, and living space additions. The main foyer and hall has natural stone quarried from the site and generates the means to all levels. The bedrooms are upstairs with the public areas on the main level, utility & studio on the lower level. The arrangement of the spaces creates a simple yet intimate flow with each addition a reconizable block of time documenting the growth of the Alexander family. These spaces also testify to Alexanders development as an architect. The dining, kitchen, and living area exhibits the most quinessential post and beam MCM character with its flying roofline, all glass facade and fireplace as a centerpiece. The clindrical concrete flue seems to puncture the roof and anchors the ivy covered block to the glass facade.

Next door is another Alexander designed house, very similar in overall aesthetics, they almost pair up in their similarities. We also got to check out the Avril House by architect Cliff May a few doors down. The homeowners, fellow cf3 members opened their doors for a bit for us to take a tour. The house is unique in that the entire house is made out of concrete, from the foundation to the roof. All in all it was a great spring day as we got to see some other modern fanatics we hadn't seen in a awhile and the opportunity to see a couple modern homes.