ART IMITATES LIFE
Passionate fine artists and the mid-century modern
architecture that inspires their compelling canvases
Our homes are often seen as the backdrop upon which we enrich our lives and embellish our style. Even for devotees of Eichler, Streng, Cliff May, Palmer & Krisel, and other California mid-century modern homes, the house structure is, essentially, their canvas.
It is a stylized canvas, for sure, mounted in a distinct, angular, perhaps futuristic frame. But it is still a canvas. The home provides context for the business of living, but it is background -- a surrounding.
For some emerging artists, that particular mid-century modern canvas has itself become the focus. Because of its unique combination of neutrality and singularity of design, the mid-century modern look plays a dual role in the aesthetic of Americana: It symbolizes nostalgia and family security, as well as a sense of rebellion -- a departure from the traditional way we choose to relate to our surroundings.
For some artists, that duality provides rich fodder for paintings that, in different ways, explore what it means to grow up in suburban America, and how our surroundings shape our attitudes.
While young artists in their 20s such as Danny Heller of Chatsworth and New Yorker Megan Berk embrace the homes as symbols of suburban life, to be celebrated but also criticized, 58-year-old Los Angeles painter Nat Reed (whose grandfather, Eli Hedley, incidentally helped introduce America to Tiki design) sees a revolutionary notion within the homes' design.
All of these artists, however, share a passion for modern architecture -- both as symbols of Americana and as aesthetic masterpieces themselves -- that drives them to render the homes in their work.
"I'd say, just on the face of them, these homes were a pretty radical departure from traditional styles," Reed says. "Even though people came to cast dispersions on them as tract homes, they were still this sort of new thing that people wanted to change and wanted to go into the modern age...As people have revisited them, I think the homes have really been sort of a badge of being different."
Reed lovingly acknowledges a certain 'kitsch' value of the homes, and makes reference to that in his cartoon-y illustrations. "In general, I just am really attracted to this sort of almost naïve, goofy sense of optimism."
Reed's work takes the Space Age, 'Googie' look of many mid-century designs to an almost farcical conclusion, drawing out the uniqueness of buildings that many may pass on the freeway without a second glance.
That sense of fine art hidden in plain sight also influenced Canadian Scott Caple, who designed the background for Pixar's 2004 animated movie hit 'The Incredibles.' He chose to interpret mid-century modern architecture's role in American life in much the same way as when he created the super-family's home.
Caple capitalized on the style's unique strength as a symbol of suburban America, and its easy reference to Space Age heroes such as Johnny Quest, from 1960s TV animation. But he also chose it because it is simple and unobtrusive. Flat panels and straight lines allow the viewer to focus on the family, while still providing a quiet subtext. The homes are instantly recognizable as suburban tract homes, a notion that carries with it a sense of conformity at odds with their radical design.
"In the movie, one of the themes is that [the Incredibles] have become nobodies. So they put them in this environment where everything is the same. Of course the house they have is the same as everyone else's house," Caple says.
In creating the Incredibles' home, Caple and his team visited Eichler developments in Marin County and Oakland, as well as in Southern California. He says the final product depicted in the movie comes closest to Eichlers he saw in San Rafael's Lucas Valley.
Caple says he decided to use an Eichler-inspired design precisely because it is over-stylized and unique, even while being ordinary. "A lot of those designs, the homes, the cars, they look better in the concept art than they do in real life. You draw an Eichler home and they look great, but then in real life they have telephone poles sticking up beside them," he says.
"For me, one of the exciting things about being able to come up with these designs was that, it was something I'd been looking at all my life. As a kid, flipping through magazines around the house. It instills itself in your mind."
But the optimism that inspires Caple and Reed comes with a darker side. The nuclear family is as imperfect a unit as can be found anywhere, with undercurrents of discord and unhappiness juxtaposed with togetherness and domestic bliss. Megan Berk explores that darkness in her series of Palm Springs modern homes, on which she embarked after falling in love with the homes' look on a visit to the desert city.
"I'm seduced by a lot of it in terms of middle-class comfort and style and leisure. But at the same time I'm put in a position of wanting to criticize it," Berk says. "For me it was really landing on something where I had my foot in two places. It said something about me as a painter, wanting both beauty and grit."
Taking a break in her Brooklyn studio, Berk gestures to a black-and-green portrait of the front of a mid-century modern home. The yard and driveway are clearly defined, as is the shape of the house, but the entrance is shrouded in darkness.
"You have to work your way in there imaginatively. The straightforward, aesthetic pleasures of the front of the house are kind of right there, but I used shadows a lot to kind of suggest the unknown lairs of the life that's lived within," Berk says.
"It's a way of feeling out some problematic desires [that] I think a lot of people have, especially women," Berk says. "The kind of things I paint, I think, tie into identity issues for me, because I've always been very enticed by a lot of ideas about domestic life -- the domestic life of my grandmother, basically -- aesthetically and in a lot of very little ways. I pull my identity from her era, and that can be problematic on a personal level. You're thinking about a life, a domestic life, that maybe does or maybe doesn't mesh with your career goals or independence."
Berk's at-odds relationship with her subject matter comes in part from the economic realities of today. While the middle part of the 20th century was a time when many young Americans found success and affordable suburban housing, these days home-ownership can lead to serious financial trouble. The real estate crash of 2008 happened as Berk created many of her paintings, and it informed her work. "The idea of a dream home has become a very dangerous idea," she says.
The elusiveness of the 'American dream' plays into Danny Heller's work as well, though with less blatant suspicion than Berk's, leaving more up to the imagination of the viewer. He paints hyper-realistic scenes that feel almost like snapshots. Using few depictions of people or activity, his works often make the viewer feel as if he or she is driving down a suburban street on a quiet weekday afternoon, wondering what stories might lie behind the doors of each house.
"That American dream is still being perpetuated but also altered. It seems like families are still the same but also different from what was going on in that [mid-century] period," Heller says.
"The family dynamics have changed. Instead of the nuclear family, maybe it's a couple, or maybe it's more people working from home instead of the stay-at-home mom and the father that goes out to work."
But the look and feel of the neighborhood stays the same, Heller says, which throws the changing nature of our culture into relief.
"You have those real-trimmed hedges, [such as in the movie] 'Edward Scissorhands' or something, topiaries. You have the rock siding on some of the homes, older mailboxes, things like that. If you get inside them, a lot of times there's still that kind of time warp. You'll have a computer or cell phone around to show that it's the year 2009, but the drapes and the furniture and the lighting go back to those earlier times," Heller says.
Like Nat Reed, Heller says part of his attraction to the homes as subjects for his paintings comes from their apparent plainness; again, the sense of them being artwork that goes unnoticed even though we see it every day.
"It's not necessarily hidden, it's out in the open. It's in plain sight but people might not stop and look, or maybe they get turned away on the surface because it looks like a bland suburb," he says.
The context in which these homes are usually seen -- that is, as residential suburbs forgotten in bedroom communities -- colors how we see them as art, Heller says. "Sometimes a lot of the same stuff is preserved in the city. There it has some kind of recognition. But since it's in the suburbs, it's overlooked," he says.
Heller's sense of preservation of these understated homes echoes that of many mid-century modern purists. What in the '80s might have been considered architectural clay on which to force a different aesthetic is now becoming cool again for both its kitschy-ness and the look itself. Heller says a lot of his buyers own mid-century moderns and want to celebrate them.
The very same notion of decorating a mid-century modern home with paintings that celebrate the style is what first compelled Reed, a former mailman who now designs websites, to start painting. Reed and his partner lived in Los Angeles and first became attracted to mid-century modern when they visited friends in Palm Springs in the early part of the decade. They liked the style of the desert homes, but also the lifestyle of the city and their friends there.
"People would drop in on each other, they'd drop in on us, we'd drop in on them, have a barbecue. It was so much more casual than Los Angeles. I just became kind of enamored with the whole thing," Reed says. "That's really when the transition from doing assemblage work to doing work on paper started for me." Reed started in art making works out of found objects.
About six years ago, Reed and his partner bought an Alexander home in Palm Springs and began fixing it up as a weekend project. They finished after four years, and Reed began painting his over-stylized tributes to the form as a way to decorate their newly completed project.
Reed says his Googie-inspired paintings also come from the Tiki sensibility he picked up from his grandfather years ago. "I think, even though it's not quite the same as the mid-century modern, it all has this sort of 'embracing' about it that wants to take everything in and synthesize it and present it back to a modern public," he says of the Tiki aesthetic.
But while Heller and Reed often find their paintings being hung within the homes they depict, Berk says the people -- mainly New Yorkers -- who have bought her works may not want to invest and live in one of these homes, but are nonetheless interested in them as architecture and artistic fodder.
"They're more interested in pinning down and thinking about the desire behind the image of that home," Berk says of her buyers. "[They're] apartment owners, city people mostly."
Somewhere in between the full-force celebration of the style that is Reed and the heavy suspicion of Berk comes Orange County artist Josh 'Shag' Agle. His over-stylized, cartoon-like paintings are some of the most well known send-ups of mid-century modern life. His work focuses on the people of the era, portraying beatniks, guys in plaid sport coats, and women in slinky cocktail dresses, all partying in houses that are thoroughly mid-century modern.
While the joy and optimism of the era come through plainly in his work, Shag also focuses on the hedonism. "[The mid-century era] to me implies hedonism -- the great cocktail parties, the smoking and the drinking," Agle told CA-Modern recently. "Playboy magazine from the '50s and early '60s embodies that. It was okay to be a hedonist."
Animals populate Agle's scenes -- bears, wolves, and apes, wearing beatnik attire or suits with skinny ties. While cute and playful, they also remind the viewer of the base, underlying nature of many social interactions. There's something predatory going on here. This is not Disney. To that foreboding end, Agle says that his latest book, 'Autumn's Come Undone,' is "darker and more personal than anything I've done in the past."
Desire -- whether for domesticity or individuality, tradition or revolution, or just for a cool-looking thing -- plays a big role in driving all of these artists to paint, as it does in driving homebuyers to these unique living spaces. One doesn't 'just happen' to purchase a modern home.
Similarly, these artists did not set out to paint 'a house,' and find themselves in front of a mid-century modern. They were inspired by the designs and by the feelings generated by these iconic structures. And their art, in its myriad styles, comes from the stirring effect of these domestic canvases.
Photos: John Eng; and courtesy Megan Berk, Scott Caple
Paintings: courtesy the individual artists, Pixar Animation Studios/Walt Disney Company
STORY RESOURCES
Danny Heller: dannyhellerart.com
Nat Reed: natreed.com
Scott Caple: web.mac.com/rscaple/Site/Intro.html
Megan Berk: meganberk.com
Shag: shag.com
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