Bluff Estate Art

Lynne Taetzsch

Performance

Medium

Acrylic on canvas

Dimensions

48 × 48 in

Framed

In a thick black moulding

Year

Room

Main Entry

Taetzsch paints standing at the easel with music on, answering whatever is already on the canvas. Layers accumulate over days without quite covering what came before, which is why the white here reads as depth rather than as blank ground.

About the artist

American

Moved from oil to acrylic in the early 1980s because acrylic dries at the speed she works. She paints standing at an easel with music playing, responding to whatever is in front of her, and returns over many days so that layers accumulate without erasing what is underneath — which is where the sense of intense energy in the finished canvases comes from. TOSCA named her New York State artist of the year in 2011. She has painted full time in her Ithaca studio since 2000.

Diamond Dotz

Fiona and Fritz

Medium

Resin drills set on printed adhesive canvas

Dimensions

15¾ × 19¾ in

Framed

In a thin bright gold frame

Year

Room

Main Entry

A kit, and the only work in the house made by following instructions: thousands of faceted resin dots placed one at a time onto a printed and gummed canvas, each on its own numbered square. Close to, it is a grid; at the far end of the entry it resolves into two hippopotamuses in dark water, the adult lowering her head and the calf lifting its muzzle to meet her.

It hangs by the door because of who is in it. Fiona and Fritz are the Cincinnati Zoo hippos, and they are also the artists of Untitled (three impressions) in the basement — the only two names in this house that appear both as subject and as maker. One picture of them, made dot by dot by a person; three made by the animals themselves.

Kit size is inferred from the proportions of the printed canvas, which match a 40 × 50 cm kit closely and nothing else. Wants a tape measure, and the year it was finished.

Joe Parrott

Kendrick Place

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

24 × 30 in

Year

Room

Galleria Hallway

Kendrick Place is a short street in Knoxville, where Parrott has lived his whole life. He paints it the way he paints everything — for the light. “For me, it’s all about the light and shadows.”

About the artist

American, born 1944

Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, and still there. He took a business degree at the University of Tennessee in 1967 and spent forty-three years in the graphic arts trade, painting alongside it, before taking it up full time. Self-taught, and open about his debts — Hopper, Van Gogh, and the printmaker Martin Lewis. He paints sunlight on brick and the deep shadow beside it.

Josine Vignon

Alpine Pass

Medium

Oil on canvas, very thick impasto

Dimensions

26 × 41 in

Framed

≈ 36 × 50 in, in a carved wood frame with a cream liner

Year

1960s

Signed

Lower right, J. Vignon

Room

Galleria Hallway

Painted from a vantage that must have meant a long climb. The paint stands off the canvas far enough to throw its own shadow — the rock face is built rather than described.

About the artist

French, 1922–2022

Lived and worked on the rue Beautreillis, in the Marais in Paris, for most of a century-long life. Her painting descends from the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists but is entirely her own in handling: very thick impasto, a high and joyful palette, and enormous energy. She painted Paris, Provence, and the country in between, and remains largely undiscovered.

Anette Holmberg

New Year (Nytår)

Medium

Acrylic on masonite, in a solid iron frame

Dimensions

70⅛ × 47¼ in (178 × 120 cm)

Framed

75.6 × 52.8 in (192 × 134 cm), in its solid iron frame

Year

1997–98

Signed

Monogram AH lower right; signed in full on the reverse

Room

Galleria Hallway

The largest thing in the house, and the only one that arrived with its own iron frame. Holmberg’s subject is usually the tactile difference between materials; here the paint is worked to feel like weather coming in off the Sound.

About the artist

Danish, born 1969

Holds a master’s in art education with an emphasis on art and aesthetic theory. She works in textured acrylic and in collages of metal, and describes her subject as the way different materials feel against one another. The paintings are usually read through Nordic light — spare, cool, and more concerned with surface than with image. She lives and works in Denmark.

Giacomo de Pass

Untitled

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

40 × 30 in

Framed

≈ 43 × 33 in, in a gilt frame

Year

1971

Signed

Lower right

Room

Galleria Hallway

1971 is the year de Pass’s figures begin to come apart into light. Five of them here, or four and an afterimage — the painting refuses to settle on a number.

About the artist

French, of Venetian descent, born Morocco 1938

Entered the Fine-Arts Academy of Casablanca in 1954 and was advised by his own master to leave it: “Flee this academic environment, avoid the workshops, preserve your nature and your personality.” He did, and showed for the first time at the Casablanca Independents Salon in 1956, aged seventeen. He has been impossible to place ever since — impressionist, expressionist, fauve, symbolist, fantastic surrealist, and at times very nearly abstract. Since 1978 he has worked at the Moulin de Peymeinade in the south of France.

Mary Anne Reilly

Dumbarton Gardens with Sculpture

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

65 × 54 in

Framed

≈ 71 × 59 in, in a carved gilt frame

Year

Room

Living Room

Reilly has painted the gardens at Dumbarton Oaks for years, and describes them as somewhere to disappear to — “the sense of asylum and quiet adventure that I discovered there.” The whole surface is built from separate touches of colour, so the light through the trees is mixed in the eye rather than on the palette.

About the artist

American

Studied printmaking and painting at the Corcoran School of Art, took a BFA at the University of Dayton, and continued at the Louvre and Schiller College in Paris, where she received the René Cassin Award. She is known internationally for pointillist paintings of the gardens at Dumbarton Oaks, and has shown in some 25 solo and 120 group exhibitions from Washington and New York to Paris, Tokyo and Kyiv.

Edward E. Herrmann

View at Chad’s Ford

Medium

Oil on masonite

Dimensions

60 × 41 in

Framed

≈ 67 × 47 in, in a white and black frame

Year

December 1969

Signed

Lower left, E.E. Herrmann, with 12.69 beneath

Provenance

Forsythe Gallery, 201 Nickels Arcade, Ann Arbor, Michigan — its label on the reverse, giving the title and the medium. Later the Benjaman Gallery, Buffalo.

Room

Upstairs Bedroom

Chadds Ford is on the Brandywine in Pennsylvania — Wyeth country, painted more or less continuously for a century. Herrmann is nobody’s idea of a Brandywine painter, and that is what makes this one worth looking at: the stone farmhouse and the bare winter trees are the local subject, but the handling is fast, wet and flatly designed, with the orange and gold massed at the centre against a scumbled grey sky and long verticals of blue-green dragged down through the foreground.

He dated it 12.69, and 1969 is the year he opened his own studio and gallery in South Bend after two decades in industry. It is the work of a man who had just stopped being a designer for a living.

About the artist

American, 1914–2012

Born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and trained as a mechanical engineer at Purdue and Penn State. He spent 1935 to 1958 in industry, latterly running interior design and colour for Raymond Loewy Associates and for Studebaker-Packard — Loewy being the designer of the Coldspot refrigerator, the Studebaker Avanti and the Shell logo. He then set up his own design consultancy in South Bend and taught at the Art Center there for sixteen years, opening his own studio and gallery in 1969. He moved to Estes Park, Colorado in 1975, and is best known for the watercolour landscapes he painted there. Largely self-taught as a painter.

Where a South Bend designer’s eye fell on a Pennsylvania farmhouse is not recorded — though he had studied at Penn State. The Forsythe Gallery ran in Ann Arbor from the mid-1940s until the mid-1980s, so the label dates the painting’s first sale only loosely.

Jim Twerell

Empire

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

36 × 48 in

Framed

≈ 46 × 55 in, in an ornate gilt frame

Year

2018

Room

Upstairs Bedroom

Twerell paints New York from the one angle a resident actually gets: head tilted back on the pavement, the building foreshortened into something closer to a poster than a portrait.

About the artist

American

Born and raised in New York City and a graduate of the School of Visual Arts. He studied at the New York Film School and worked in independent film production before committing to oil paint. His canvases sit between pop art and expressionism, and return again and again to New York architecture — the Brooklyn Bridge, the Flatiron, water towers, and the towers of midtown seen from below.

Jeff Christ

Talquin

Medium

Mixed media on archival paper

Dimensions

32 × 46 in

Framed

37 × 47 in, in a pale wood frame with a deep white mat

Year

1982

Signed

Lower right, in pencil over the paint, and dated 82

Room

Upstairs Room

Lake Talquin lies about ten miles west of Tallahassee — not a natural lake but a drowned river valley, made in 1927 when the Jackson Bluff Dam was thrown across the Ochlockonee. Its name is a portmanteau of the two towns it sits between, Tallahassee and Quincy. Christ was at Florida State, in the first of them.

The sheet keeps the water’s two registers — turquoise at the top where the light sits on the surface, and a sandy ochre below where it does not reach — and then works the whole thing over with a drawn, scratched shorthand of hooks and zigzags. That marking is the printmaker in him: he studied under two of them.

About the artist

American, born Miami

Trained at Florida State University under Arthur Deshaies (1920–2011) and William Walmsley (1923–2010) — Walmsley founded the university’s print studio in 1962 and invented fluorescent lithography; both taught there until 1989. Christ then took an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He showed Private Language at the Dunedin Fine Art Center in Florida in the winter of 2015, which described him as having “been working undercover for the last twenty years” and his paintings as “a force of nature — in scale, process and palette.”

Birth year, the years he was at Tallahassee and at Chicago, and whether Talquin was painted in Florida or from memory elsewhere.

Catherine Picard-Gibbs

City of Light

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

48 × 30 in

Year

Room

Basement

The light source is inside the town rather than in the sky, which is what makes it read as a vision instead of a sunset. Picard-Gibbs calls her way of working textural expressionism; the paint here is pushed around with everything but a brush.

About the artist

American, born 1959

Painter, curator, art educator and graphic designer, working from a former factory building in Easthampton, Massachusetts. She calls her method textural expressionism: bold strokes and saturated colour, the surface built up and scratched back with whatever tool suits. Recent work has moved onto copper, a Renaissance support she has taken up for its light. She shows throughout Massachusetts, in New York and in the Midwest.

Sam Mendes

American Beauty

Medium

Printed one-sheet

Dimensions

27 × 40 in

Framed

Flat one-inch grey moulding, no mat

Year

1999

Room

Basement

There is a theory behind this wall, and its owner has written it down more than once: that we come preloaded with instincts which fire only weakly at ordinary life but hard at the tidy, engineered narratives of film. So the scenes that make you tear up are the most honest inventory you will ever get of what you actually value. These four are that inventory.

What he takes from this one is that whatever repels from one angle can be beautiful from another, and that the film refuses to let you settle on either. A middle-aged man's fixation on his daughter's friend is grotesque, and it is also the thing that returns him to life; the girl is a vacuous teenager and a person who saves someone, and you are made to feel both at once. His wife is hard and acquisitive and unfaithful, and you are still given her coming back to life to feel something about. Even the man who does the worst thing in the film is handed a reason you cannot quite refuse to hear. Nothing in it is permitted to be only one thing.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Amélie

Medium

Printed one-sheet

Dimensions

27 × 40 in

Framed

Flat one-inch grey moulding, no mat

Year

2001

Room

Basement

The Japanese release, titled アメリ. A shy woman in Montmartre discovers she is very good at arranging other people's happiness from just out of sight, and hopeless at arranging her own — the whole film turns on a tin of childhood things given back to a stranger forty years late.

Its other thread is a man who collects the torn-up photobooth portraits people leave behind, and cannot work out why one face keeps recurring across years and cities. The owner has cited that solution as the particular pleasure of a puzzle whose answer was sitting in the picture the entire time.

Darren Aronofsky

The Fountain

Medium

Printed one-sheet

Dimensions

27 × 40 in

Framed

Flat one-inch grey moulding, no mat

Year

2006

Room

Basement

Three strands a thousand years apart — a conquistador, a scientist, a man travelling toward a dying star — and one refusal to accept a death running through all of them.

Worth knowing what you are looking at: when the budget collapsed the effects were not rebuilt in CGI. The nebulae are macro photography of chemicals reacting in fluid, shot through a microscope. That is why the gold in it has not aged the way its contemporaries' rendering has, and why it holds up on a wall at all.

Martin Brest

Meet Joe Black

Medium

Printed one-sheet

Dimensions

27 × 40 in

Framed

Flat one-inch grey moulding, no mat

Year

1998

Room

Basement

Death takes a body and a holiday, and a dying man spends his last days negotiating with him. Three hours long and entirely sincere about it, which is the reason it divides people.

The owner files it in a genre of his own naming — the life well lived — and calls it his favourite of that kind. His reading of it: someone who keeps part of himself back is never actually held, because the embrace closes around only the part he was willing to show, and everything else trails after him like something haunting the room. You cannot be lost in another person while you are still busy being haunted by yourself.

Richard Pryke

The Lonely Drinker

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

29⅝ × 29⅝ in (75.2 × 75.2 cm)

Framed

≈ 36 × 36 in, in a wood frame with a white liner

Year

1999

Signed

Lower right

Room

Basement

Almost half the picture is empty carpet. The title tells you where to look, and the composition makes you cross the room to get there.

About the artist

British, born 1933

A British painter of interiors and figures, working in oil. His restaurant and bar scenes use a great deal of empty floor and a single occupied point, so that the architecture does the emotional work. The Lonely Drinker dates from 1999.

Training, exhibitions and representation still to be traced.