finding your calling

For me, there is a character that most items possess. When I want to elaborate or imagine a chair’s possibilities, or how the lampshade relates to the lamp or the shape of the room to the furniture placement; I put myself into a playful kind of mood. The best solutions are the easiest when I can do this. Remember the primarily and secondary colors in elementary school? If you want to know what is a complementary color, it’s across the chart, remember? It’s doing what you wouldn’t think to do, but instinctively you feel and sometimes using systems that work easily for you as the designer.

I often remember the story of Picasso keeping his writing implements under the bed. When he woke up in the night he had ideas he wanted to explore so he wanted his sketchpad or his miniature canvases right there. He was the vessel and the ideas flowed through him. To me, this is the way good ideas come….closer to the dream than the reality of what some people say: ‘This is the way it’s usually done.”

During one of my first days as a retail store decorator in the Union Square Macy's in San Francisco, I was given a task by the display director to fill a vignette in the bath department. A simple job. I thought. There was a curved back wall behind a counter with a built in sink on a cabinet. I began by hanging curio shelving,  bath accessories from the department's inventory.  I added fragrances and soaps that fit my color scheme of bath towels. It looked alright I thought, until the director's assistant came by. She was always dressed to the hilt, never yielding a hammer or worked a sewing machine. She simply 'had the eye' for what was right. Janette gasped as her red hair flipping around with her glance towards my display. I stood by, as we were instructed to do, when the brass showed up for reviews. She picked up a nearby phone, announcing a gathering of all creative staff to the bath department immediately, for a display critique.

The frolicking display boys tore my vignette apart as per her orders, whispering apologies to me under their breath. Finally there was an empty counter and dead silence. "Time to learn!" she announced with a stare in my direction. All nine display folks, led by Janette, took the elevator to the furniture floor to watch her stack five items onto a moving cart:  a beautiful baroque style mirror, a crystal lamp with a silk shade, a thick green glass soap dish and a few small landscape oil paintings. We were on our way back to the bath display area.

Janette had the boys hang the mirror over the sink and the little paintings off the side wall. She turned on the lamp for a warm glow of light over a stack of celadon colored towels. She tore a soap wrapper open describing how important it is to break packages in order for the customer to appreciate the products. All of this quite new to me.

That was the day I learned about less is more and don't mess with the small stuff. Janette's sink counter was elegant, peaceful and not at all what I had horribly attempted to do. The crew came over one by one, giving me hugs telling me not to worry; that I was new and soon I would 'get it'. Janette imparted only a few words after the boys left: "Never disappoint me like this again. You are the only woman here. The men need to be put in their place because they too often think they are hot shit." They were hot shit and I was lucky to have them as my first design teachers.

I'll never forget Janette embarrassing me so, and yet,  at the same time teaching me my first lesson in selecting carefully. Well worth any discomfort; is the enlightenment that comes soon after.

It’s been awhile since I heard voices from the big old tree on Cascade Drive. I would sit next to the bridge on concrete slab, sometimes eating bits from my lunch box I saved after school, to share with my friends the fairies, who lived in the gnarled oak. I never remember talking about them with anyone of my friends. I suppose I knew no one would believe me if I spoke about their tiny voices and the long discussions we would have quietly. I just always knew they were there, like old friends waiting for me, each time I would take the time to sit and listen. We usually talked about how to make a ladder out of dried leaves, or a bed of soft ferns. Sometimes I would make furniture from little sticks and bits of bark and group them into a setting complete with moss carpet. If the remains of my little grouping sat on the stoop, on the way home and the wind hadn’t blown too hard, I knew my friends had come to gather there….those little fairies, whispering and playing in my arrangement of dusty leaves and twigs.

 I’m not sure when I became distracted with other delights like hanging out in the playground with the boys, or trying on different shades of lipstick. But one day I walked by the old tree and I knew they weren’t there anymore. A chapter had ended and a new one wasn’t at all clear. When had I decided all things had to make sense and fantasy was a thing only fools believed in? But it happened without much regret, well maybe a little…but homework and chores gobbled up my fairy voices. There just wasn’t time or the inclination to listen anymore.

I’ve been a designer now for almost 35 years and if you count back to the days of making stick arrangements, maybe a little longer. Construction management is my everyday. Punch list items roam around in my head, of all the rooms I'm designing. It’s seldom I have the time to really play with materials unless I design it into the projects I build (which I usually do). Yet only a moment of pleasure exists at the end of the work, when the fantasy becomes reality, before I close the door on one finished project and open the door to another.

A few years back I decided the only way I could insure playtime never left my world, was to open a studio warehouse, take the materials I love to play with and put them out on a table, that I didn’t have to put away until I decided. The best gift I have, besides the smiles on my children’s faces of course, is the ability to transform at any moment, on any whim, with any reclaimed scrap of a sweater or blanket or paper mache’ beads. I crave creating from something old, used, beat up, and usually broken. Making it into a new thing is what I do best. I collect those things that have long lives. Things that live to tell a story excite me, as you can tell from my Antares collection.

I still think about the fairies from time to time and wonder if there isn’t something about childhood that stays with us over the years, like a breathing forest, a bird in front of my window or a gurgling stream. Maybe we don’t believe the way we used to. Maybe we can’t hear the voices anymore, but when I hear the laughter of a young child, or see the delight in a clients face, or find just the right old pulley to hang my light from, or the right convergence of materials, there’s the same thrill of the ride. The same knowledge that fantasy is only a matter of perspective and I’m never far from home....if I can simply listen.