Art/Life/Art/Life

A Point Roberts real estate agent said to me once, ‘You never know what you are going to find when you knock on a door in Point Roberts.’ She was talking about the fact that although the outside of a house may be simple cottage, inside it may be startlingly sophisticated design. Other contrasts also happen, as today demonstrated.

Friends had invited us to visit the home of a local artist who did assemblage. Nobody was quite sure what this translated into in this particular case, but I was thinking something like Louise Nevelson. Instead, more something like Andy Goldsworthy by way of a really good thrift store, and both indoors and outdoors. And certainly not what I expected when we arrived at the house. It’s an ordinary looking house about 2 blocks from us, a house that I’ve walked by a thousand times, always admiring the peach trees that grow so vigorously behind the front fence. I spoke with the older, Canadian owners some years ago when I was out on a walk but they sold the house some three or four years ago and I had never run into the new owners.

We entered into a typically old-time kind of Point Roberts house, 4 or 5 small and crowded rooms and a yard also crowded with fruit trees and plants. But the rooms of the house--all the rooms--were filled not only with the required furnishings, but also with arranged pieces: dozens and dozens of them. Many small containers, often with their lids closed, all to be opened and investigated. A box filled with other boxes, each bearing one or two small pieces of old-fashioned jewelry, each with a story that the artist/gatherer could tell, but each reminding me of a similar piece I own or had once owned with a story that I could tell. A checker board with pieces that were never part of any checker game I’ve ever played, but clearly a game I could play if only someone would help me to find out the rules. Kitchen objects arranged carefully on a tray, drawing attention to qualities they share other than their practical purpose, although also including that. A small, old-fashioned travel case inhabited by a few, well-worn stuffed animals. I had a travel case like that 55 years ago when I went on a train trip, and beloved stuffed animals even longer ago. They would love to have lived in such an elegant home.

Outdoors, the yard was filled with many fruit trees, including a gorgeous pear whose fruit seemed as carefully arranged as the pieces in the house. In addition, every otherwise available area of the yard was filled with arrangements similar to those in the house, but here using rocks, shells, driftwood, metal, gravel, the objects of the earth, rather than the objects of human making. A small rock whose shape accommodated another and much smaller rock in only one precise location. Carefully arranged bird feathers gathered from the beach. Everywhere I looked, I saw the owner’s/artist’s hand at work, bringing together pieces/objects that had not previously met but that he imagined could benefit by the introduction. Such a great deal of thought and concern in this matchmaking. Too much to see in an hour or two, but the work easily conveys an attitude toward being on this earth that is genuinely inspired. We are here; other things are here; pay attention to them: see them as well as use them, respect them, enjoy them, take time for them.

No small surprise to find that the author of all this is a physician who lives here only part of the year and otherwise travels the world. He is, he says, an arranger of things. Right behind the doors of a perfectly ordinary little house. You can see his work here.