Traveling can be inconvenient. Entering Arizona was a longer jump, followed by a series of shorter jumps from town to town. Arriving at each place there is a setting, a building, people and their things. This is a picture of just one object in a home filled with thousands upon thousands of carefully collected objects of art.
One fascinating coincidence is that there are plans to sail up to Paradise Cove off Malibu. The owner of this object spent much of her adult life in a home there. Traveling took the husband and wife to the Southwest, then further south to Mexico. One object after another was purchased. Furniture, rugs, chandeliers, vases, platters, sculptures, wood carvings, clay figurines, tile and paintings.
Their home is filled to the brim with the objects of art they have collected. If I were to fill my home with even a fraction of these objects and then after invite my wife to see what I’d found she would have asked me to seek counseling, at the very least from an interior decorator while looking for a good auction house where some percentage of this cresting wave of object upon object might be sold off to the highest bidder.
What is most extraordinary is that there are glorious souls in this world with the time, money and inclination to collect. My host described how her mother had become an world recognized expert on the Japanese art of wood block printing. Over a lifetime she had collected many prints, then she was invited to curate a show of Japanese wood block prints for a major museum, a book followed, and her reputation and expertise and legend was forever fixed in this one specific medium.
Vases that stand five feet tall, weighing hundreds of pounds, covered in ceramic glaze fashioned into a storyline, if you can study each figure, each clue, you may discover the story and meaning the artist has with great effort attempted to leave to the future. I counted at least a dozen of this size, another hundred perhaps half as big, and another two or three hundred again half the size of the largest examples of this vase storytelling art.
Today is Sunday. I will get another opportunity to see more of this vast collection. I’ll walk for exercise, eat with friends tonight, and carry on as usual traveling further south to see one of my street performing/circus acts friends on Monday in a town where the script I am working on there is set a few scenes.
Every stop on this trip that began a mere 9 days ago has been filled with surprise. In my appreciation for one friend where I stopped who had helped me sort out a loose wire to my inverter/charger I said— you know, you make a terrific friend— and his reply — so how much money do you need— I thought fair enough, somewhat surprised by the response but not entirely, I backed a few steps back smiled and said— not too much, in fact I need none at all, but I did want to express my appreciation for sharing time with you—
Not just collecting surprise in this instance handing some out—
Do they live in another house near the one in which these amazing icons live?
Well, my friend’s landlady lives in the midst of all these many objects of art. I think it fair to say that it is unsettling, I would rather have a much smaller far more curated series of objects to live with. But, after my visit and talking she’s already started selling objects off, collectors came by Sunday and so the process has started. I think she is just still shocked from loss of her husband and only beginning to ask basic questions like how do I want my life to look. One of the neat pieces of being with others is that they help bring our own lives into sharper contrast…