My Ideal World

A half a graham cracker makes an excellent breakfast. I'm in a cobbling-together kind of mood, feeling like by gob, I can make pretty much anything using my two hands and the stuff we've managed to gather in our house.

On the open studios tour that Squid and I took a few months ago in Sebastopol I encountered one house that still haunts me as some kind of pinnacle. An ideal. I'll attempt to describe it.

It's funny, because Squid took another of her friends on the same tour, and that sparked her wanting to have three children, a project she got started on right away with the conception of the third; because there was one farm where an old woman, an artist and writer, had all her grandchildren running loose around the property in an idyll of Big Family quirky childhood. I could feel the pull of that one, of the kids all gathered around the table after having played all day in some abandoned outbuilding putting on a production of Hamlet all on their own.

The house on our stop that took my fancy, however, was one which was announced by the huge sculptures on all the lawns of the neighbors, Red Grooms-style cartoon figures towering huge and metal and extremely funny and cool all up and down the street.

It was a rambling house with a huge garage out back, the driveway completely lined with racks of scrap metal of all shapes and sizes. It was a place where materials were simply waiting to be used in some cockamamie art piece or another. Teenagers with funny hair and little fetching outfits and far too much eyeliner were gathered in the old clubhouse which doubled as the cash register cubby. It turns out the painting that I wanted to buy was painted by the girl with the boy scout uniform held together with safety pins.

How ideal! To have a house ready to make art at any moment. To treat the kids to a childhood in which art was simply made at all times, by everyone, the adults, the small to large children, everyone. Can you imagine it? I was swept up in the ideal. Living in a place where you made stuff, whenever you felt like it. Yes.

Comments

[anushree rai]

its cool
i like it a lot