Eames house studies (Brace/Tempt)

Whenever I travel—family trips and holidays, vacations to new or familiar cities, conference and research trips—I take something with me to paint or to draw with. The impulse is more aspirational than real; all too often, the little plastic Windsor & Newton pan set sits in my bag untouched, either because I forgot to take it with me when I ventured away from the hotel, or because I was just too tired and busy to get to using it. 

A recent conference trip to Pasadena is case-and-point—except that I had scheduled a visit to the Eames houses. Built in the late 1940s by industrial designer couple Ray & Charles Eames, these buildings had a significant impact on 20th century architecture & design, becoming in the process an icon. One of the rules of visiting, however, is that photographs of the interiors is not allowed.

Nothing in the visiting rules, however, said anything about sketches.

It was one of those strange wet weekends in Southern California, when everything pops green and it feels more like the Bay Area that I was visiting from than the stereotype of L.A. The rain was intermittent and light, so that I was able to easily sketch in my notebook with my purple-inked pen, but just enough that at one point, Andy Shanken (a professor I study with) pointed down and softly noted that the rain was making some of my drawing run a little. I nodded, assented to my knowledge. I had noticed it earlier, but it wasn't so bad that the images were marred beyond use, and I figured I would make better ones later. These? They were just for me to get a sense of the place.

One characteristic of the Eames houses that stands out is how the pair of them are aligned with a row of eucalyptus trees. A docent explained this was intentional, that the Eames had chosen to retain several trees in line with the houses, knowing full well they would grow and change with time, and that this organic yet linear presence would also form a relationship with the geometry of the two steel buildings. It's an evocative pairing, the two cubes, and the wildly leaning eucalyptus, perched on the hillside above the Pacific. 

Back in the hotel that night, I dug out my pans and my brush, filled a hotel tumbler with water, and set out to make a study that cleaned up my field sketches. I made a minor error that I did not notice until later, relating to the western porch area, but no matter—the basic point was to capture in some sense those two geometries, one freewheeling and fluid, the other rectilinear and stable. Just a few lines, just a little color.

Several days later, in my office at Wurster, I dug out these same materials, and tried it again, this time using a fat ink pen to lay out the lines, and making the colors bolder. The end result started to feel a bit Wiener Werkstätte but lacked something. I vaguely recall somewhere reading a story that said that every time we remember, we are not recalling the memory of what we experienced, but the memory of the last time we remembered. The ways that the two houses and the one row of trees shifted in my depictions might be a symptom of that, but I suspect more that the changes had to do with me imposing my own design logic upon the place, emphasizing what I saw (intellectually) at the expense of all the subtle things that existed but that I did not file away, either in my notebook, or in myself. One element had withstood my memory, but I had lost my grasp of the eucalyptus perfume. 

Eames House studies. Ink on paper (left), ink and watercolor on watercolor paper (center and right). 2016.