Notes on renovating the American Gothic house

On 4 March, I wrote a post I titled Help Me Grant Wood and in it I detailed a presentation I was working on that had to do with an imaginary renovation of the house that sits in the background of Grant Wood's American Gothic.

What started out as an interesting idea has become my life's work over the last five weeks. I have never used SketchUp at this level before and I've never researched something so exhaustively in my life.

Right after I learned that it was a real house in Eldon, Iowa (that's currently rented to a caretaker by the way), I started digging around for anything I could find out about it. I found an entire library of photographs. That was relatively easy.

I hit on the mother lode when I found the Wapello County Assessor's website. On it, I found the property records for the house. I was hoping to find the plat for the property, but I found something equally useful in its place. Ta-da!

It's the measured footprint of the American Gothic House.

I saved it as a .jpg and imported into a SketchUp file and then I scaled it up to the proper size. So now that I knew how big the interior walls were, I could figure out the heights of everything from looking over the library of photographs I'd accumulated.

Here's the final exterior view I drew.

When I was digging around for photos, I came across this one.

It's the only image I could find of the back of the house. Who knew that there was another Gothic window and a back porch on the American Gothic house?

Speaking of that window, it took me the better part of a Saturday to get the radii right on that Gothic arch.

So there are the exterior shots. Ultimately, that model's going to end up Google Earth and that's pretty cool. I never thought I'd have a model on Google Earth some day. It's an interesting thing to ponder.

I finished the interior yesterday and I think I did the house proud. I'm not showing the interiors here just yet, though I will eventually. If you really want to see them though, you'll have to come to Chicago next Thursday.

Profiled by the Decorating Diva

My great friend Carmen writes the great website The Decorating Diva. Back in February, Carmen asked me to put together a Designer's Look Book for her site. Designer's Look Books are a regularly-appearing feature on The Decorating Diva. Carmen asks a designer to put together a list of selections and then Carmen assembles everything into a single page look book. To say I'm honored by this is an understatement.

The things I put together for Carmen are a departure from my usual fare and it was a blast to really run with that. Carmen's request came at the same time that I was working on my presentations for KBIS, one of which covers something I'm calling New Traditionalism. That's also the name of my presentation.

New Traditionalism is an aesthetic I first started seeing on design blog's like Gina Milne's Willow Decor, Joni Webb's Cote de Texas, Things That Inspire and Decorno. There are many more of course, but they're the ones that come to mind.

Maybe it's just me and my market but the Las Vegas-inspired Mediterranean kitchens that were all the rage a couple of years ago have disappeared completely. To that I say Hallelujah.

This seems to be a trend that was started by Christopher Peacock but it's been taken and run with by Mick De Giulio and countless others. It started on the extreme high end and trickled down pretty quickly and I swear half of my calls come from people who are looking for white painted cabinets and marble counters. I don't think it's a bad thing at all but it's important to remember that this aesthetic, like the ones that preceded it, is a trend. It's a throw back to an earlier time and it takes a lot of its cues from the early 20th century. But in the early 20th century, a kitchen was a dark room in the back of the house. This is pure trend. Not that that's a bad thing, but it's important to call things what they are.

Anyhow, I have a hard time picking finishes for the idea of a room. I need a real room to work with. Here's one of my perspective drawings.

This is also the room I had in mind when I put together a Look Book for Carmen. It fits this New Traditionalism aesthetic pretty well if I may say so myself and some of the finishes I listed for it in my Look Book are:

A walnut table from Spekva.

Pasadena Chairs from Thos. Moser.

Calacatta Gold marble.

An Aga Legacy range.

A bronze sink from Rocky Mountain hardware.

A chandelier from Vaughan Designs.

They're just my favorites. Check out the rest of my finishes for this room on The Decorating Diva and let me know what you think. What do you think too about this whole New Traditionalism thing? I'm I onto something or am I out to lunch?

A request for guests. Guest posters that is.

Next weekend is the Kitchen and Bath Industry Show in Chicago. My schedule for those four days is rather daunting and I'm wondering if anybody out there would like to write a guest post during that time. I'm looking for people who can write something within the confines of my niche here, but if you look at how broadly I define my niche you'll see that just about anything goes. All I ask is that you be authentic and interesting.

I need someone or several someones to cover next Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday. I'll be doing short posts as I can, but you'll end up carrying the day. Leave me a comment here or drop me an e-mail at p.anater@gmail.com.

Thanks!

Michelangelo speaks

Portrait of Michelangelo (after 1535) by Jacopino del Conte

My post this morning about the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel reminded me that I have a collected works of Michelangelo in my book case. I dug it out and found this:

   A goiter it seems I got from this backward craning
like the cats get there in Lombardy, or wherever
—bad water, they say, from lapping their fetid river.
My belly, tugged under my chin, 's all out of whack.
     Beard points like a finger at heaven. Near the back
of my neck, skull scrapes where a hunchback's lump would be.
I'm pigeon-breasted, a harpy! Face dribbled—see?—
like a Byzantine floor, mosaic. From all this straining
     my guts and my hambones tangle, pretty near.
Thank God I can swivel my butt about for ballast.
Feet are out of sight; they just scuffle around, erratic.
     Up front my hide's tight elastic; in the rear
it's slack and droopy, except where crimps have callused.
I'm bent like a bow, half-round, type Asiatic.
     Not odd that what's on my mind,
when expressed, comes out weird, jumbled. Don't berate;
no gun with its barrel screwy can shoot straight.
     Giovanni, come agitate
for my pride, my poor dead art! I don't belong!
Who's a painter? Me? No way! They've got me wrong.

The Complete Poems of Michelangelo
©1998, 198 pages, Translated by John Frederick Nims

He wrote that while he was painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Clearly, spending four years on a scaffold looking up took a toll on his body.

It's difficult to see his humanity when you look at his work. He achieved a state of artistic perfection that's otherworldly to say the least. Reading that abbreviated sonnet puts a human face on him.

Up close and personal with a Renaissance master work

The Vatican Museum just launched a high-resolution, panoramic photograph of the interior of the Sistine Chapel. Photograph fails to describe this site utterly, but I don't think the language has caught up with this technology yet. Follow this link and go on a tour. Photographs of the Sistine Chapel never cease to amaze me but this is something on a whole other level. This photograph lets a view pan and zoom and in doing so, you can see parts of the chapel that you can't see even when you're standing in it.

When most people think of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, they think of this image.

That's actually a detail from the center, the whole 12,000 square feet of that ceiling look like this.

My hero, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, painted it over four years from 1508 to 1512. Michelangelo didn't consider himself to be a painter and accepted the commission from Pope Julius II under duress. I'd love to know how those conversations went but alas, they are lost to history. Julius was a megalomaniac and Michelangelo was a neurotic, I'm sure hilarity ensued.

This online, interactive photo lets you get up close and personal with this amazing work and while it's hardly a substitute for being there in person, it does let you see aspects of Michelangelo's work you'd never see otherwise. If you go back to that first image of God and Adam, you can see that Michelangelo depicted God in the shape of a human brain. Seriously, zoom in on it. Keep in mind too, that there isn't a flat surface to be had on this ceiling, it's a flattened barrel arch that's cut transversely by eight smaller vaults along its length and four compound arches at either end.

All art captures the history of the time it was created and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is the ultimate time capsule from the 1500s. It's not possible to exaggerate the advances being made in science, philosophy, religion, politics and art from that period. All of those new ideas are writ large on that ceiling. As such, this ceiling is nothing less than a complete story of the underpinnings over western civilization.

The Roman High Renaissance was a heady time but it came to a sudden end when Rome was sacked in 1527 by mercenaries from the Holy Roman Empire. In the aftermath of that invasion and pillaging, a new and more serious air permeated what had been a laboratory for free thinking.

Michelangelo accepted a second commission in the chapel in 1535, when he painted his Last Judgment on the wall behind the altar.

It's a massive work and because Michelangelo painted it, it's filled with surprises that are plainly visible with this interactive photograph.

Here's St. Bartholomew and he's holding his own flayed skin.

It's St. Batholomew's skin, but that's Michelangelo's face.

Michelangelo's comfort with showing human nudity caused a lot of controversy in its day and that controversy reached it's peak as he was painting his Last Judgment. George Vasari's 1987 book The Lives of the Artists quotes Michelangelo's chief accuser, Biagio da Cesena: "it was mostly disgraceful that in so sacred a place there should have been depicted all those nude figures, exposing themselves so shamefully, and that it was no work for a papal chapel but rather for the public baths and taverns."

Michelangelo got even with him by depicting him as Minos, a judge of the underworld. To make his point further, Minos has the ears of an ass.

Even more amusing is that when da Cesena complained to the Pope about the depiction, the Pope told da Cesena: "That is too bad. If you were in purgatory, I could help you. But my jurisdiction does not extend to hell, so the portrait will have to remain."

It's cool when a 500-year-old joke can still get a laugh.

The forces da Cesena represented had the final say though because shortly after Michelangelo died in 1564, the nudes in the Last Judgment were covered by loin cloths and fig leaves.

Thanks go to the terrific Nancie Mills-Pipgras, my editor at Mosaic Art Now, who pointed me to EternallyCool.net, where I saw this Sistine Chapel link last week.