crazy mixed up Art Castle

If you were an archaeologist with a medieval turn of mind and a Victorian sense of interior design, what would you do if an aunt died and left you a fortune? If you were Henry Chapman Mercer, you'd also be an ardent Arts & Crafts proponent and you'd build Fonthill, an outrageous fantasy castle in lovely Bucks County, Pennsylvania (a short drive NW of Philadelphia.) In 1898, before Mercer built Fonthill (in 1908, entirely of hand-mixed concrete) he created the Moravian Pottery & Tile Works to produce art tiles with designs inspired by his 10 years of travel in Europe, where he clearly made a close study of all the historical sites. He returned and became a member of the UPenn Archeology department (despite having no degree in the subject) but it was when his wealthy aunt died that he really let loose with the Arts & Crafts. The Arts & Crafts movement, a reaction to industrialization that promoted such painstakingly patient arts as hand carved furniture, closely patterned textiles and wallpapers, and hand-printed books, was particularly strong in the late 1800's; major figures include William Morris in England and Elbert Hubbard in the US. Mercer was a bit late for that party but he seems not to have noticed. Every corner, every nook and cranny (Mercer should be a patron saint of nooks and crannies), truly every inch - walls, floors, and ceilings - is decorated in his quirky obsessive, handwork-attentive style. The ceilings are a particular high point - the tour guide described the way in which laborers piled mounds of dirt on a platform across the tops of columns. When the shape was correct, they then covered the dirt with sand and pressed in tile decorations - thus working not only blindly but upside down and backwards - and poured the concrete ceiling. Only when it was set completely could they see if they had made any mistakes - there were very few from what I could see, but they couldn't have done much about them if there had been. The whole place is a wonder. One of my favorites was the room with columns in which Mercer imbedded small clay cuneiform tablets from early Mesopotamian civilizations (2500-3000 bce) then surrounded them with tiles giving dates and details of their content - trade in sheep, names of kings, etc. Also the Columbus Room, with a jigsaw puzzle ceiling with the map of the world and an illustrated history of the age of exploration (all made of tiles set into concrete, remember - upside down, backwards, working blindly.) There's no interior photography allowed so I'm using what I could find to give an idea. Pictures don't really do it justice in any case. There's no way to convey the moody, solitary genius spirit of the place with its twisting staircases, odd angles, slightly morbid atmosphere (Mercer died in a narrow bed in one of the nook/crannies) that is both claustrophobic and fascinating - you need to see it. 
Note: the Moravian Pottery Works continues to operate, still churning out Henry's designs.There is also a nearby Mercer Museum. The website for all Mercer related sites is at http://www.mercermuseum.org/

Balancing Art and Business

I saw a sign recently that said 'If you're an artist you're already a success.' It's a nice thought and true to some extent, but there are still bills to pay. I'm always interested in how artists manage to juggle the demands of art with the demands of practical life, whether in history or at the current moment. As a working artist, my interest in the question is not academic. So in pursuit of answers to the question, for myself and in general, I went to the SURTEX/Stationery Trade show last week in New York. So much color, so much design and pattern, much cuteness and cleverness - aisle after aisle. I learned a good deal (for example, did you know that there is an award called the Louie for the best in greeting card design?) and picked up plenty of useful information. Some booths took up a lot of real estate, but as I wandered I  kept my eye out for the smaller, more personal approach. I found quite a few artist/entrepreneurs who are managing the balance very well. Amy Smyth has had enough success with her basic line - http://www.amysmythmadeit.com - that she has initiated a second one, Ecka & Pecka, named, charmingly, for the imaginary friends of her niece. She spoke of the satisfactions of taking the business side seriously in order to make a life from her creative work. Further on, I found a couple of family efforts. J-Dig cards - http://jdigcards.bigcartel.com - is the product of two brothers who share the creative work (one for the ideas, one for the designs) with the help of a spouse who does the marketing, while Clouds & Ink http://www.cloudsandink.com is the combined effort of a daughter and her father - he creates paintings from which she selects patterns to use with her line drawings in card designs. They all reported success and satisfaction with the creative and business sides of their efforts. If you're an artist who has found a good balance, leave me a comment and let me know how you do it - I'd love to help spread the word.

Quilting Women and Tibetan Monks

I'm a great advocate of finding common links between disparate cultures and people - I make that sense of shared humanity the primary tenet of much of my teaching - so I was pleased to see that today's NYTimes articles about the Quilt exhibit at the Folk Art Museum (the final exhibit before it turns the building over to MOMA) and the Tibetan Arts exhibit at the Newark Museum gave me new material. The organizing principles of quilt making and of the mandalas of Tibetan monks are both reflections of a similar human need - for order, pattern, and regularized meaning and beauty. Quilts seem much less exotic - homey, crafted of familiar low value materials such as simple cottons or even discarded clothing, normally made by women whose arts are traditionally less valued than the brawnier arts of men, they come into being to serve a practical purpose - warmth for a bed and a spark of color amid the drabness of daily life. Tibetan mandalas, on the other hand, are made as a means to touch the divine and act as a form of prayer. They are painstakingly constructed, colored grain of sand by colored grain of sand, according to ancient traditions of iconography, by revered holy men. Part of their meaning is that they never last - like fragile life itself, the physical reality of the mandala is soon dispersed to the winds and gone. What remains is only the truth of the memory. But is that so very different from a quilt? First, note the pictures and see the fine use of geometry and mathematics in both forms. But similarities go deeper: like the iconography of the mandalas quilt patterns were often revered as a connection to a personal or community history with designs being passed down from generation to generation. The Tibetan community of monks relates as well to the communal activity of quilting bees. Yet surely much of the historical handiwork of woman was created painstakingly in isolated living rooms - no matter how much effort went into each careful stitch there might be no one to notice but a few family members. As with the ephemeral mandalas, the creator of a quilt had to find in the act the satisfaction of creation. And with the exception of cloth work preserved with care, like these quilts at the Folk Art Museum, much is gone forever, used up with constant wear - blown away by the winds of time. Both these exhibits display works of great, and very different beauty and meaning, but together they say something deeply true about being human.

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/05/12/arts/design/20110513-folk.html
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/05/12/arts/design/20110513-tibet.html