The Painted House
Written by Ashley Woods Hollister
COLLAGE BASED ON THE WORK OF FREDERICK Schwankovsky FEATURING A TEENAGED JACKSON POLLOCK
“Different places on the face of the earth have different vibrations, different polarity with different stars. Call it what you like, but the spirit of a place is a great reality.”
“If I had nowhere to go in the world, I would come to Ojai. I would sit under the orange tree; it would shade me from the sun, and I would live on the fruit.”
I am daydreaming again — it’s a weekend in 1928, and I am somewhere between Los Angeles and Ojai, in a Nathanael West version of Southern California. I am in the backseat of one Professor Frederick Schwankovsky’s automobile. We are traveling north through oak savannah, at speed, on a one-lane highway. A young Philip Goldstein (later he would change his name to Guston) is sitting beside me, gazing out the window, deep in thought, contemplating the frescoes of Piero della Franchesca. His friend and fellow Manual Arts High School student Jack Pollock is riding shotgun, feet up on the dash. He is asking Schwankovsky if he can take the wheel. He wants to go faster.
We are on our way to the little town of Ojai — on an extracurricular field trip in search of Eastern Wisdom. We are going there to sit at the feet of Jiddu Krishnamurti, under the sacred groves of Live and Valley Oak, and we all know that the secret to great art is somewhere very close, among the trees.
TONY
“When Krishnamurti was in town, Charlene and I would go listen to him teach at The Grove — hundreds of people would show up. It was a great place for an afternoon nap.”
I am speaking with artist, architect, and teacher Tony Gwilliam outside of GraySpace Gallery in Santa Barbara. He has just returned from weathering what would turn out to be Phase 1 of the pandemic at his Eco-Village in Bali, the Bloo Lagoon. We are attending an opening for the newest Artist Residency Program in town, GONE Residency, the brainchild of his son, the painter Skye Gwilliam, his partner, artist Dari Mos, and other collaborators.
The residency is hosting NYC curator Avi Gitler, owner of Gitler &___, as well as a pair of his artists from Orlando, Florida for the summer, in collaboration with GraySpace Gallery — which was founded by the artist and designer Charlene Broudy, who was married to Tony and who is Skye’s mother.
Tony’s humor is contagious. I am not sure if all Welshmen from Nottingham are born with this level of wit-drenched charisma, but I am hooked. When he moved to Ojai in the late 1970s after his ideas became too much for conservative British architectural circles, the reimagining of the built human world and the commitment to spiritual and creative transformation of space and culture were not exactly the norm. A small, dedicated community of visionary artists, architects, and designers had to build it from scratch wherever they could. Ojai became an early gathering point on the planet for these Avant-Garde activities.
Tony continues, still clearly the teacher after all these years: “As humans develop memory, create language and other tools, and externalize their knowledge, they create the first vestiges of our externalized DNA, the more durable of which come down to us as standing stones, cave paintings, and tombs/wombs. Often these structures are cosmic tools to mark space and time...”
TONY AND BUCKY
Tony’s master, whom he brought in his head and heart to Ojai when he and Charlene moved to a tiny two-room house on Willow Street, was and remains the influential architect Buckminster Fuller. Tony taught Bucky’s ideas during his tenure at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and later worked with him side-by-side on his Now House Project in Philadelphia and Vancouver. (Tony would continue his Bucky proselytizing at The New School breakaway, the Southern California Institute of Architecture, throughout the 1980s). These were radical concepts, and Tony was one of the early innovators of these ideas and the worldview they supported. They centered, above all, around building self-sustaining space for human culture to thrive in balance with nature and the intelligent use of new technology.
DOME, INTERIOR
“We were ideas-heavy, light on funds. We built a little world [in Ojai], and I suppose it began to influence the people around us,” says Tony.
A small progressive bohemian community began to develop — fuelled by a mutual passion for free creativity and exploratory, sustainable, experimental architecture, design, and cultural expression. This was the epicenter and artistic beginnings of the Ojai Avant-Garde in the late-1970s through the 1980s, long before these ideas were subjected to marketing, corporate influence, and City Planning. They were fresh, vital, even a little dangerous.
TONY GWILLIAM DRESSED FOR OJAI MARDI GRAS
In Tony’s memoir, Far From Boring, he describes the times: “The 1980s were a very busy and creative time […] being part of the local community. We also contributed to the local events...the Mardi Gras Ball, Ojai Day…. The Ojai Foundation, under the leadership of Joan Halifax, played a role in our lives, with introductions to organic gardening, Thich Nhat Hanh, Joseph Campbell, and Native American ways of going back to the land. I continued my architectural practice doing projects for the Ojai Foundation, a caretaker’s house, master plan, and a Kiva...”
Tony adds, “We would sit around the fire and listen to people like Joseph Campbell speak about the potential for different ways of being…Joan Halifax was a real visionary, and she was able to bring to Ojai a world-class set of like-minded humans together at the [Ojai] Foundation.”
Tony continued the Now House Project in Ojai at the Ojai Valley School under a new name, DWELLNET, a “net-zero” approach to building design. The plan was to build a self-sustaining Dome prototype at the school as an educational experiment for their students, complete with aquaculture, solar features, modular living quarters (Tony called them Mantainers, a concept he developed in London that sought to create the absolute minimum space needed for a single human to live and which could be married to other Mantainers to create modular communities), as well as many features that we would recognize these days as standards for net-zero construction. DWELLNET developed wherever Tony found space to realize the project, first in Montecito, amongst the famous hippie communities on Banana Road, then in a communal house in Carpinteria, and finally in Ojai.
THE DOME, EXTERIOR
With help from the new Oakland-based company North Face, who donated and fabricated the skin for the DWELLNET Project, the all-volunteer crew used military surplus materials, old doughboy pools, old beds, and salvaged materials to realize the experiment. (North Face would eventually realize that their tents were too durable and didn’t break soon enough for their shareholders, and eventually pivoted away from well-built tents to ski fashion-wear and consumables).
Later, Tony would continue to develop his ideas in new directions, creating T-Houses inspired by Japanese designs, a concept called a G-Home, and eventually an entire Eco-Village in Bali, the Bloo Lagoon. In ’91, at the personal request of Cristo, he became a team leader on the Umbrellas Project, Southern California.
Tony’s entire life has been one of experiment inside forward-looking communities, much of the time as their leader. Prototype seems to be in the man’s blood.
“There was a day when I was in school when I was contemplating the structure of a brick, and I asked myself, ‘why must it be this shape, and not a tetrahedron, or any other shape?’ That was it for me. It led me to Bucky, and everything else flowed from there.”
REVOLT IS ESSENTIAL
My daydream continues — Professor Schwankovsky and his human cargo have arrived at The Grove. There must be hundreds of people seated under the oaks listening to Krishnamurti speak under the dappled late-afternoon light. His voice has a British colonial accent with a musical cadence, soft but authoritative:
Jackson Pollock, Pennsylvania Landscape, 1936, oil on canvas, 12 1/2 x 18 5/8 in, $60,000-$100,000 SOURCE: FREEMAN’S
“Psychologically, we are all attempting to become something. All time is in the present. The future is now.”
“When you bind life to beliefs, traditions, to codes of morality, you kill life. In order to keep alive, vital, ever-changing, ever-growing, as the tree that is ever putting out new leaves, you must give to life the opportunities, the nourishment... Revolt is essential to escape from the narrowness of tradition, from the binding influence of belief, of theories.”
With the rest of the crowd, the professor and his two star pupils are spellbound. You could hear a pin drop if there were something other than a bed of trampled grass for it to fall on.
Driving back to LA, the men are silent, engaged in private meditations on what they had just experienced. The ideas and recollections of that day, one of a handful of Ojai day trips, would carry each of them to personal journeys that, at least in the case of young Guston and Pollock, would alter the world of art and culture forever. The experience would birth, eventually, American Art’s Grand Idea: Abstract Expressionism. Pretty good for a few afternoons under the trees. I wonder to myself, what would have happened if Guston, from Montreal, and Pollock, from Wyoming, had had a different, less eccentric professor; if Krishnamurti, from Madras, hadn’t found Ojai?
CHARLENE
A few weeks later, I am at a salon-style gathering at Charlene Broudy’s house in Santa Barbara. A group of artists and their families are gathered around a large redwood table on a Sunday night, feasting on fresh Northern Halibut from the Fish Market and Santa Maria-style tri-tip. I have pulled Charlene aside for a chat outside on the back terrace, which looks out over the mesa onto Elings Park, where paragliders use the mowed hill as a launching pad.
Charlene’s eyes sparkle with intelligence and perceptiveness — artists’ eyes. She has a relaxed way about her, with wonderfully curly hair, a ready smile, her laughter more a giggle, like a young girl’s. At this moment, she looks to me like Santa Barbara’s own Gertrude Stein, surrounded by artists, her natural environment.
She is telling me how she met Tony as a young architectural student in London...
CHARLENE IN THE MANTAINER, 1975
“I was Tony’s student in London. I was going to school at the Architectural Association School of Architecture. Tony was an incredibly radical thinker and a bit of a fashion icon at the time.”
When Charlene was a student, Tony tells me, he staged a “happening” having to do with an inflatable Tomato House, a teaching experiment he was conducting in conjunction with his Mantainer Project (a 1m X 1m X 2m house that you could take around with you and which released you from bourgeois culture). This caused some consternation amongst school administrators, so he decided to quit London and wander China for a few weeks, carrying a small handheld Super 8, which he timed to take pictures of whatever he was facing every five seconds. A three-week trip through China became a three-hour film document of Tony’s time there.
In 1976 he followed Charlene to the United States, to California, where he thought he had been promised a teaching position at USC. Neither the job nor the relationship with Charlene coalesced at this time, but luckily Bucky called and asked Tony to go to Philadelphia to work on the Now House Project. In the meantime, Charlene moved to San Francisco and, with a degree in graphic design, began working closely with the visionary choreographer Anna Halprin, who helped redefine dance in post-war America and was a founder of the experimental art form known as “postmodern dance,” collaborating with the likes of poet Richard Brautigan.
“After San Francisco, I reconnected with Tony on Banana Road. Then we moved to a communal house of seven in Carpinteria. They were all Bucky people working on a Dome project. I was the only artist and the only female.”
“When the landlord decided to sell the Carp house, Tony and I moved to Ojai to build the DWELLNET Dome on Ojai Valley School land. We rented a small house on Willow Street where I made one of two rooms into my design studio. This is where Skye was born. When Skye was three years old, we were able to buy a house on Alvarado Street in Meiners Oaks.”
Charlene and Tony would host salon dinners at the Alvarado house. Everyone in the creative scene would be there, seated around their table. The whole Avant-Garde in their little place, exchanging ideas. “That part was great,” says Charlene, “However, for me, Tony would say, ‘I’ve invited a few people over for dinner.’ A ‘few,’ in fact, would turn out to be 12 or 15, maybe 3 times a week. When I asked, ‘When are they arriving?’ he might answer, ‘In an hour.’ As a result, I decided I was done with cooking … but not with salons perhaps.”
Charlene laughs. It’s true; she is done with cooking for good. The artists she invites to dinner gratefully cook for her these days.
CHARLENE AND SKYE IN THE AIRSTREAM ON ALVARADO STREET, 1981
I ask her about raising a son in this environment, and she responds, “Ojai at the time was an ideal place to raise a child in total freedom. We were very permissive. I would do that differently now,” she laughs again, “but I had decided I would never say “no” to Skye if I didn’t have to.”
During this time, Charlene began working with the architect and designer Sherrill Broudy, founder of Forms and Surfaces, an architectural design company headquartered in Santa Barbara. One of his employees had seen serigraphs that Charlene had created while in London, showed them to Sherrill, and so began their working relationship.
After Charlene and Tony divorced, Sherrill and Charlene began a personal relationship. Sherrill soon after traveled to Costa Rica to manufacture the furniture he designed. Becoming enamored with the landscape, Sherrill bought 40 acres in the foothills of Costa Rica. Over the next twenty-five years, Sherrill and Charlene built first one, then another, hotel, seeking “an endless design project.” They collaborated on everything from furniture to textiles, paintings, mosaics, sculptures, murals, and tapestries.
Charlene continues, “We wanted the hotels to be an immersive art experience. Sherrill built a large art studio on the property, and my ‘job,’ so to speak, was to produce art for the walls. And Sherrill never stopped building walls, an artist’s dream.”
The hotel projects became Xandari Resort & Spa, opened in 1996, and Xandari by the Pacific (now Alma Del Pacifico), opened in 2007. The couple sold both properties when Sherrill turned ninety. Charlene had created hundreds of art pieces for the hotels over the decades, which became an integral part of the guests’ experience at both resorts.
In 2012, Sherrill and Charlene designed a contemporary home and art studio on a ranch in the rural Upper Valley of Ojai. Soon after Sherrill died, Charlene opened GraySpace Gallery in Santa Barbara’s Funk Zone.
ANNIE & JIDDU
I am daydreaming yet again — traveling a few more years backward in time; now I am wandering through the oaks at what would become Happy Valley School (currently Besant Hill School), in Upper Ojai, watching Dr. Annie Besant and her adopted son Jiddu Krishnamurti walk the ground, developing a grand vision in their minds. They are speaking together of a place where the individual can grow in freedom and exploration; this former member of the London School Board and founder of the Indian Home Rule movement is having grand thoughts of a new humanity; and in the young mind of Jiddu Krishnamurti, I can see the same vision taking hold, one that would blossom into a commitment to creating a place of education in this Valley to honor his adopted mother, to teach a new way of being to willing seekers...seekers like Guston and Pollock and Professor S., who some years later, would listen to him espouse these ideas under the same trees.
I wonder if Annie and Jiddu know precisely what they are walking through — that Ojai is, in fact, the remnants of a novel ecology tended by the Chumash for over 10,000 years, a place where the oaks were gardened, where the Native Americans dispersed their seeds to create a sustainable environment for use by their communities, an extension of their ideas and worldview. Annie and Jiddu are, in fact dreaming their new dreams in the old house the Chumash built.
Much later, during the Second World War, this would inspire Krishnamurti to bring his friend Aldous Huxley to this place and enlist him (among others) to shepherd into existence the Happy Valley School, the teaching arm of his and Annie’s grand vision for a renewed humanity.
SKYE
I am now standing in the front yard of a charming little green house a few blocks north of Ojai Avenue, in the heart of Ojai proper. The landscaping is primarily native, volunteer, and deliberately unkempt — Matilija poppies, daffodils, hollyhock, sage everywhere, a lemon tree, and the tiniest Pixie tree you’ve ever seen. There also stands, in the side yard, a lone banana tree, a gift, I am told, planted by a latter-day wise man called the Pale Warrior, who has since left the Valley of his birth to live on a mountain top overlooking the Western Gate, some miles due west, along the Transverse Range.
I have arrived at what Skye Gwilliam calls, with fondness, The Painted House.
I’m invited into the house by the duo design team Lazy Susan (comprised of owner Sam Petry and her partner Graham Pressley), who have been living and working here since the pandemic lockdowns began in early 2020, and who are Skye and Dari Mos’ collaborators in the GONE Residency project. They’ve told me what to expect, but walking into what one would otherwise call the living room was still a shock to the system. Floor-to-ceiling, the house is covered with the iconography of the countless artists who’ve passed through this place: images, paste-ups, words, and phrases — all scrawled extempore in ink, aerosol, oil, and acrylic paints. Framed artworks, many hand-carved and leafed in gold, hang salon-style from the walls; canvases hang suspended from the ceiling. A back catalog of Skye’s works is stacked neatly on industrial kitchen racks in the dining room. Lazy Susan has set up an informal framing operation here, with dozens of artworks waiting for their frames, lying in expectation on plastic foldaway tables. A gilding station has been set up in the spare room, and Dari Mos’ photography hangs on the walls. Gwilliam’s sculpture experiments scattered throughout the house, concrete and rebar fabrications resembling urban totems of decay. I pick up a spiral notebook that contains the work of an artist I recognize from my talks with Charlene, part of her artist group when she was raising Skye in the 1980s, Richard Stine (Skye would later tell me that Stine’s work was a significant influence to him growing up at the Alvarado house).
The house is a trove of artwork from local, national, and international artists. Handmade silver gelatin prints from a French photographer, Christophe Bonniere, works on paper by Indonesian artist Targo, fluid acrylic abstract canvases by New York artist Ed Cohen, dozens of small assemblage works by Santa Barbara artist Dan Levin, a recently commissioned work by Carmen Abelleira, and a stretched canvas by New York color field artist Peter Bradley.
We sit down and make a FaceTime call to France, hoping to catch Skye and Dari Mos in St. Girons, the small town in the south in the Pyrenees, on the smugglers’ trail close to Spain. WiFi is spotty there, but we get lucky and are soon looking through the screen at Skye and Dari Mos and a rambunctious puppy in their home on the river. I’ve met Skye several times previously; still, it seems to me that if a person can actually look 6’6” in a FaceTime call, he does. Dari Mos is his opposite; she is petite with thick dark curls, giant eyes; kinetic. I ask Skye how it felt to grow up in Meiners Oaks and Ojai in the 1980s, with parents like Tony and Charlene.
SKYE PAINTING ON ALVARADO STREET, MEINERS OAKS, CIRCA 1987
He laughs quietly, “I think I lived in a bubble until I went to public school in the 3rd grade… I grew up around the people of the Ojai Foundation. It influenced me, going to the gatherings; basically, all I knew was farm-living and hippie kids. There was this big community of people that looked after each other, who shared meals and music; a creative community, living off the grid, a kind of philosophical society trying to live an ideal. It never felt pretentious; there was no judgment, and wealth wasn’t a status symbol in that community. There were people from all classes, and I never felt a tension between classes of people… anyone who was seeking to contribute was welcomed. It was a truly open culture, no thievery, a completely open safe space, where Truth was a big deal.”
I ask Skye a potentially stupid question, “So was it inevitable that you’d end up this way?”
He laughs again and continues, “When I started going to public school, that was my first confrontation with commerce in life. You had to buy the right shoes, the right clothes, to fit in, things I wasn’t aware of as a youngster. I wasn’t primed to operate in “normal” culture; I learned that then. It’s a bit poetic that growing up in what I’d call a utopian society made me ill-equipped to function very well in a culture of inauthenticity, commerce, and competition. I could see how counterproductive competition was for the species, and to be a truth-teller wasn’t really considered to be fashionable. I kind of decided I’d rather be alone, pursue my own path. And I was lucky enough that my parents seemed to understand that and encourage it. That said, I had to learn that these things can work on a small level, but at a certain point, you are going to get too much inauthenticity, and there’s gonna be someone coming along who wants to bottle it.”
In his mid-teens, Skye developed problems with his balance, which led to a diagnosis of a vestibular disorder. This severely limited his mobility and led him to start painting full-time, working through the trauma of the loss.
“I started painting on large, unstretched canvas in Ventura, at first as a way of trying to survive. I was impressed by the alternative communities, the ‘crews’ that graffiti artists seemed to have. They were mainly comprised of marginalized people with something other than a ‘normal’ perspective on the culture and offered a counter-cultural release, but there were lots of rules, and I wasn’t used to that... Eventually, I began my experiments with oils...”
Charlene says of Skye at the time, “I started being really impressed with Skye’s work when he was painting in Ventura. Sherrill and I really admired the works of that period. I loved the work, and I wanted him to develop, so I started looking for a place for him to work. We had some money from the hotel sale, which included 150 or so pieces of my artwork, and riding my bike through the Funk Zone one day, I found this building that was too expensive but seemed ideal.” The price of the building on Gray Avenue dropped several times until Charlene could afford it. Sherrill also loved Skye’s work, respected Skye, and understood that he needed a place to thrive. Sherrill agreed to buy the building, sight unseen.
Over the next decade, Skye turned 219 Gray Avenue into a studio and living space, gradually cultivating an outpost of open culture and experiment that continues into the present. Over the years, Skye would invite dozens of artists to come to share his space, recreating the kind of community he knew as a child.
In 2015, a few months after Sherrill’s death, Skye suggested that Charlene make half of the Gray Avenue property into a gallery. These years coincided with the rapid gentrification around Gray Avenue, with marketers resurrecting an old colloquialism for the area into a branded neighborhood, The Funk Zone. Meanwhile, the same was happening in Ojai. Real estate prices soared, and artists were pushed out to the margins (from the places that used to be the margins). As 219 Gray Avenue became a vestigial island of authentic culture, Ojai found itself on a similar trajectory in a sea of winery tasting rooms, restaurants, and on-trend boutiques. The fight was on for the soul of both.
It was as if the family was nearly back where they had started. The only difference is that they had places to continue their Experiments; instead of being forced to find places to build their Domes, if you will, now they merely had to stick to their guns. Charlene is well aware, noting simply, “At any point now, we could rent out Gray Avenue to a bunch of lawyers and charge market rent. But then, where would we be?”
photo OF SKYE AND DARI MOS BY Elena Berg-Bonniere, Soueix, France, 2021
“When I met Dari, one of the first things we talked about was building a philosophical society,” Skye says, “a group of people who shared everything, something like what she had experienced with a group of fellow students in the theatre department at the Clermont-Ferrand” (in marked contrast to her experience at the Sorbonne, which was hyper-competitive and anti-communitarian), “or what I experienced growing up as a kid in Ojai. These ideas can become real, but you can’t force it. You have to have the right people and the right place. Even where we are now in France, we are often seeking out new people to bring into the fold.”
I ask if the plan is to extend what’s been built at the gallery in Santa Barbara and at the Painted House in Ojai, in France. “Yeah,” says Skye, “The next steps are to create an exchange between European and American artists in these places. We’ll send the Europeans to America, and the Americans to Europe… [and] see what happens. Most artists simply need a sympathetic environment in which to live and work. The rest…they know what to do. [GONE] Residency, I hope, will become a platform for that. It’s already happening. Residencies don’t necessarily have to be tied to institutions; they can be networks.”
When Skye invited the artist Peter Bradley to the Painted House in 2017, Peter was engaged in a residency I was heading up in Santa Barbara at the time, doing large-scale work for a solo show at GraySpace. He immediately understood what Skye was up to. He recalled being a young gallery associate at Perls Galleries in New York and how Mark Rothko would come in and loiter for hours, chain-smoking. “My bosses wanted me to kick him out.” Mark would argue with the clients and make a scene. Peter explained that often what is essential if real art is going to happen is creating a place where artists can be themselves, warts and all. Peter added his own note to the walls of the Painted House that day, “2 Shirts in a Bag”, a reference to his time in Guatemala hunting rare orchids.
“Two shirts in a bag is all you need,” he said, as a metaphor for experimental exploration. Broke at the time, he was receiving communiqués from Peggy Guggenheim in New York, at a local Peace Corps outpost, where he’d shown up one day with two shirts in a bag, seemingly having emerged right out of the jungle. He was lucky. The head of the mission was sympathetic to artists and gave him sanctuary.
In 1971 Peter would conceive and execute the first racially integrated art exhibition in America — the De Luxe Show, in a defunct movie theatre in a blighted neighborhood in downtown Houston, TX, at the behest of the legendary art patrons John and Dominique de Menil. Peter understood what openness to other worlds does for the human mind. He had the vision to present world class white and Black artists together to a poor working-class Black neighborhood — to children, workers, and housewives, in a format that bucked an American culture that was failing us so utterly that it thought it had to segregate even art along the color line. If this wasn’t a forward-looking, experimental mind at work, I don’t know what to call it.
BACK TO THE NOW
I have now been on the trail of this family for two months. I’ve just left the Painted House and walked the three blocks to Bart’s Books, the end of my journey, another Ojai experiment that has since turned into one of the jewels of culture in the world. Tony tells me that the bookstore began over a half-century ago (1964), with a man named Bart (Richard Bartinsdale), who, having amassed an unmanageable collection, would put out books on bookshelves (that he built for the purpose) outside his home for people to peruse and take home, leaving payment in coffee cans, inspired by Parisian book carts. Since then, and because Ojai is Ojai, it has slowly turned into a world-class destination for bibliophiles.
As I stand in the room off the kitchen (as Bart’s is still a house), the one with the faded red Damask velvet wallpaper, the complete works of Theosophist Madame Blavatsky (one could say, the origins of all of this) sit on one of the shelves. Surrounded by incredible rare editions of the world’s cumulative search for knowledge and understanding, I am struck by what a place Ojai is. Not that place is the only factor in how experimental art and culture lay down roots and thrive. But it seems to be a necessary factor, along with the people themselves, perhaps drawn to places with certain energies, certain ‘vibrations’ as D. H. Lawrence once wrote.
This reminds me of something Tony told me that day two months ago at the gallery, “I guess what I have been doing all these years, the experimental buildings really comes down to understanding how I could make spaces for community. But ultimately the buildings are not that important. Bloo Lagoon, for example, is what it has become because of the people, not the buildings.” This had puzzled me at the time, especially as I was attempting to understand this family through the lens of a place.
But now, having come to the end of my reverie and the end of my investigations into this remarkable family, I think I understand what Tony is saying. The places matter a lot; they are essential, the right soil for the right seeds. And yet, without the right seeds, without the right community, the place is really just another spot on the sphere. There is a choice and a commitment to be made in consecrating a place, and its most significant expression is the community that lives there and the ideas that are sustained by it. It’s these ideas and commitments that finally become something that can influence the world around them. Tony points to the Chumash who consecrated this Valley and its trees in their communities as being of particular significance for their world. They tended the Valley like a garden, protecting the oak trees and planting their seeds, creating the bones of Ojai’s novel ecology we know today. Many came after them, Europeans brought their cultures into the West. Somehow, out of that devastating story, good things began to grow again. Besant and Krishnamurti came. Huxley came. They, and others, in turn, told like-minded others to come, too many heavy-hitters to mention. And so began new periods of consecration, over and again.
When Tony and Charlene came to the Valley, they were not completely aware of its unique character...but the soil was right for them and their seeds. They chose to raise a son in the same soil, and he grew to share their commitments to experiment, prototype, and a community of truth-seeking, truth-telling, and freedom.
You can’t ever possibly sell this kind of thing, much less buy it, however hard a person, group or corporation tries to market or brand it. “Ojai is a Brand now,” Skye points out, “and it’s always good not to forget that culture also brings along the thing that kills it...there’s a huge difference between donning a costume and donning a life.” I think what Skye is getting at is at the core of this journey...and it comes back to what the Painted House represents in this community that has so much potential to become something extraordinary but just as quickly something banal. A novel ecology like the Painted House is a gamble and often invisible, a seemingly empty, disused lot amongst manicured lawns...one can never really know what will spring from it...but people and communities have agency, we can choose how we can try to become. There is no going back to an original state of nature — Huxley reminded us of this, the man who was a founder and trustee of that experimental school high in the hills above this town. Happy Valley School was another such experiment, a novel ecology where new ideas are still tested and grown to this day.
Guston would bring the ideas he gained here under the trees into his art and his teaching throughout his entire career, first in his murals for the WPA, then his teaching in the midwest, and finally back East, where he was one of the lone first-generation Abstract Expressionists to, bravely, return to figuration. Pollock would take this early formative influence along with Navajo sand painting, witnessed trekking the sacred Four Corners of the Southwest with his surveyor father, and pioneer a novel form of painting that laid the early radical foundations for a truly unique American art form.
I wander back out through the open-air portion of Bart’s and walk into the enclosed special book section, where all the art books are housed. London Recordings by David Sylvester stands out on a shelf to the left of the doorway; I pull it and open it to an introduction by John McEwan. Speaking of Sylvester being a perfectionist as a writer, and therefore doomed to disappointment, he writes about Sylvester’s lifelong attempt at definitive statements about artists and their work: “The crumb of comfort is [the] conclusion, pronounced by Picasso, ‘In the first place, there isn’t any solution, there never is a solution, and that’s as it should be.’ At least, in our shared frustration, we are not alone.”
I share with both men the spirit of the sentiment. The sun is setting, and Bart’s is closing for the night; I’d best buy the book, take it home, and continue where this journey takes me.
