Have you ever left the sheets draping on the floor from your bed? The blankets thrown on top? Do you ever rinse the dishes and leave them stacked in a tower next to the sink with a fresh flower in the top bowl, observing the pottery mix of designs….for awhile….maybe longer than you would normally?
How do we organize and how are we ok with the mess? Both show who we are. Being in and out of people’s homes, I am fascinated with the tendencies people have. The patterns of their behavior they have with their things. Do they always live a certain way or give themselves liberty to be the opposite?
Who are we if we don’t have an opposite view? Are we polarized by our habits, with our new ideas rating acceptability, by our standards?
I’ve been thinking about the art of interior design. When do clients embrace it and when don’t they. When does decorating become art? Years ago, I commissioned my friend Carlos Alfonzo, to complete a large scale painting for a client’s house. The clients asked that I give Carlos a color palette of colors we had used in the interior. He cringed and so did I, of the request. We both felt art should not have to color coordinate with furnishings.
Later he presented his painting with no colors from the room. He was a free artist and his work was his liberation. When the clients saw the painting, they asked me to go back and request he add certain colors. He refused, as I suspected, and he kept the painting, not receiving his payment. I felt sad, yet as an artist myself, I understood.
Carlos became one of the biggest modern artists of the eighties, especially in Europe at the time. Ten years back, the Museum of Modern Art in Miami, recognized him as the artist he was, with a one man show. The Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC collected a number of his pieces. https://www.visualaids.org/artists/detail/carlos-alfonzo
Needless to say the clients lost not only a great investment but the insight that color doesn’t matter. Just like beds can be left unmade. Sometimes woolen patches make the sweater. Leaves fallen on freshly raked ground, tell a story in their haphazard arrangement. Things are by nature unpredictable.
Yes, we need the well made plan. We will always have our habits. But it is the broken habits that often tell another story. It is the art inside of the design that is the creme of the crop, the tell tale sign of the artist in all of us. The helter-skelter of our true nature, reveals the daringness of who we really are.