Art and About – Archive

I’ve been wondering a lot lately whether artistic style is hereditary. We just bought a house and have a lot of redecorating and remodeling plans in the works to make the house “our own.” As a creative starting point, I decided to try to define what “our own” looks like.

I’ll preface this exercise by admitting that like many American couples, “our own” looks more like “my own” than “my husband’s own.”  Fortunately our tastes are tremendously similar, which makes decorating easy in our house. Hubby will definitely squawk when I make an aesthetic decision that he finds morally offensive, but otherwise we have excellent give and take in the idea-exchange department.
What I learned when I examined our style is that we live in a giant grid. Our design is very linear, with the dominant shapes being squares and rectangles. Our favorite pieces of furniture have straight lines and square shapes. Our art is hung in rectangular frames grouped in rectangular configurations. Our favorite rug has a square pattern on it. We use patchwork quilts and pillows as accent pieces. I adore a coffee table my husband made in junior high, which has an oak frame surrounding a tile chessboard design. We have a decorating theme with almost no variation.

Although I like the sense of order communicated to me through squares and straight lines, I have had to wonder if I am drawn to living life in a grid because of my forebears. My mother and grandmother quilt. My paternal grandfather was a mosaic artist. None of them has been confined to square designs, but there is a strong rectilinear component to their chosen artforms.

Although I don’t often express myself through visual art, when I do, my chosen artform is decoupage, which I consider a lazy-woman’s version of mosaic or quilting. Decoupage designs are unlimited in their freedom of movement, but mine are all comprised of squares and rectangles. This was not a conscious decision at the time of creation, but something I have noticed in retrospect. It’s a little spooky, actually. And genealogically fascinating.

With seven years of higher education to legitimate, I’ve contemplated whether mosaics, quilting and decoupage reflect something more about me than simply a preference for restrictive order. Does art imitate life?

I think I see my life as a mosaic or a patchwork quilt. Different memories, experiences, people and places each inhabit a square in my life story. Each is a self-contained unit, significant by itself. But when the lens pulls pack to see the entire picture, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

I have another ongoing project that constantly provokes me to argue artistic nature versus creative nurture. I inherited innumerable boxes of would-be scrapbook material from my dad when he died. Everything was sorted and organized, but it never made it into a book, which is my current mission. The mounds of paper he kept go back to his earliest years, and every 100 pieces or so, my heart starts racing when I find a newspaper clipping of a theater review, or a photo from a magazine or artistic reflections he wrote to himself that match something I have in my very own scrapbook. Although there is no doubt that my love of theater and creative endeavor was nurtured in my childhood, to see evidence of my dad as a teenager responding to artistry the way I do takes my breath away. It may not be hard for someone like Natalie Cole to figure out where her love of music and performing came from. For me, artistic heredity is subtler, but has an equally strong influence on my life. There are a lot more people influencing “our own” than I originally thought.