Last month I visited the New Jersey home of the 98-year-old artist Lois Dodd. Painting since the 1940s, Dodd is known for capturing the view outside her window – at night, during the day, in New York, from the countryside. She paints what is near to her, and loves to depict the “theatre of nature”, as she describes it. “Because it is always changing, so you always see something different.”
While any of us can look out of our windows, and capture what we see, Dodd’s works are distinct. On the day I drove down to her white-planked home/studio on the springiest of days, surrounded by saturated greens and yellows, I felt as if I was in a Dodd painting like Red Laundry and Window Frame or Front Door Cushing.
I’ve spent the best part of the last decade tracking down the homes of artists. Witnessing where someone lived, or the nature they grew up around, is like seeing their work from within. Suddenly everything falls into place when you see the view they looked out on, or trace the steps they took. The poet Eileen Myles once told me that they went so far as convincing an estate agent to show them an apartment in the Chicago building Joan Mitchell grew up in – just so they could get a glimpse of the painter’s childhood view overlooking Lake Michigan.
It feels especially important to experience such places when it comes to female artists (particularly those working before the 21st century), whose lives were often bound to the home. Ruth Asawa looped her wire sculptures on the kitchen table surrounded by her six children; Betye Saar turned to printmaking because that’s the scale the domestic space allowed for. Art history often dismisses the importance of the home (compared with the studio or factory) and just how much the practical can inform the artistic.
Visiting artists’ homes can also reveal the most extraordinary, and intimate, traits of their lives and practices. One that had a big impact on me was the four-storey Chelsea brownstone in New York owned by the French-American artist, Louise Bourgeois. It was tall and thin, not unlike the boxed-in, headless women in her painting series, Femme Maison. And it was a place of contradictions, the interior both haunting and inviting. Standing in her basement – a long low-ceilinged room with tools and anthropomorphic sculptures still intact – was like being in one of her cage-like Cell works. It left me with the conclusion that, for Bourgeois, her house – both a prison and site of freedom – was her muse.
Another place that felt significant was British-born artist Leonora Carrington’s former home in Mexico City. Situated on an unassuming street in Roma Norte, it is white-walled with black panelling and boasts red and white patterned tiles. Built around a giant tree in the middle courtyard, with branches that stretch out on to different floors and over the roof, it features a winding wrought iron staircase that looks as if it has been taken directly out of her paintings. Inside, the walls are lined with books that range from ghost stories to Celtic histories to guides on dealing with loneliness (I also spotted Lancashire Life magazine). Being here, you begin to understand not only what a voracious reader Carrington was, but how much – despite remaining in Mexico all her life – she maintained her British and Irish identity (she was even known to keep her PG tips under lock and key).
One day I hope to visit the New Mexican homes of painter Georgia O’Keeffe: the Abiquiú Home and Studio, and Ghost Ranch (her summer home, 12 miles away). O’Keeffe’s ways of living informed her art. Not only in her subject and colour palette – red cliffs, lunar skies, the dry dusty deserts seen in Black Mesa Landscape – but in how she dressed (variations of black suits and white shirts, wrap dresses and kimonos) and meticulously arranged her belongings corresponds directly to how she painted: the refined, seamless brush; the repeated variations on a theme.
When delving into an artist’s work, never underestimate the power of seeking out their home and surroundings. While it might be a “domestic” space, it can also be a portrait of someone’s interior mind, revealing more than even an artwork.
