Like the rest of the world, I fell in love with Downton Abbey. And after 30 years in Massachusetts I finally had a chance to drive through and make an overnight stay in the Berkshires. Now is see what all of the fuss is about. I expected the spring beauty of the rolling hills but I was not prepared for the diverse and breathtaking architecture of Western Massachusetts and Eastern New York. This window is the Downton Abbey moment of my first – but not last – journey to Western Massachusetts. It was taken at Cranwell, a gilded age property with a provenance that includes Harriet Beecher Stowe. The pastoral and architectural beauty of the property was matched only by the graciousness of the people who worked there. A real gem.
Category Archives: windows
Wade Zahares: Window Music
Now and then I post photographs of windows because I suppose I like what symbolize and how they gave composition to an image or structure to an otherwise unstructured world – I love the implied order of right angles. Wade Zahares is an artist who loves windows even more than I do, I think, and he creates art that portrays windows in ways and colors in I can only dream about. And the more of his art I see the more it matches up with times and places in our lives, including this Boston area triple decker from the ’80s and his more recent coastal New England landscapes and harbors. There is even what appears to be a midwestern plainscape – I have never felt so validated by another person’s art.
And as if that isn’t enough, he portrays trains and rolling vistas in prints and illustrations for wonderful books. We first discovered Zahares’ art though the 1998 book, Window Music, which delighted my young children and still delights me.
And for all of the sharpness of the images and vibrance of color, he works in pastels; I love the juxtaposition of sharp angles and bold landscapes – sometimes with the turf rolled back to reveal fantastic infrastructure – with the occasionally gently smudged pastel. It is fine art that stands up to the cacophony of the garish digital age, paying homage to some great pop art but keeping a kind of hand-forged integrity.
Zahares’ art, in its way, turns LettersHead on its own head, offering up 21st century art in a 20th century way. He does in images what I try to do in words, and the time he has devoted to his craft has produced spectacular results.
Thank you to Wade Zahares for giving us permission to use his art in this post.
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Window Under the Dome
This is the view from the second floor over the lobby that stands under the great dome at MIT. I walked by and often stood at this particular spot nearly every day for a few years back in the 80s and 90s, and there was always something interesting to see either inside or out: the skyline across the river, tickets and events information at lunchtime, engineering students in a bridge-building competition, or the regal rhododendron in full bloom along the perimeter of Killian Court outside. After I left the Institute I returned to the Lobby a few times to sell hand painted clothes at the craft fairs. It was lovely to work in such a busy and imposing structure; it made every task seem useful and important and sometimes I would invent reasons just to take that walk down the Infinite Corridor and feel the buzz. I miss it sometimes but on recent visits have found that the nostalgia of the architecture is not enough; it was the people and the work that kept me going, and I would almost prefer to look at the photos than walk down the corridors where, now, nobody knows my name.
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Home Windows – a reading spot
It’s been a while since I posted any window photos, though I have taken many. This one is in the house where I grew up, looking much the same now as it did then. We used to climb though the windows on the left and right to sun ourselves on the warm tar roof during cold April days. It was a sign of spring. The vantage point from which the photo was taken was where my mother kept her cedar chest, and I imagine it full of wool blankets and linen and lace wrapped in brown paper – to be honest I am not sure if that’s what was really in the chest or I am just channeling all of those Laura Ingalls Wilder books I read on that landing, my body wedged between the radiator and the window. But I do still have lace and linen wrapped in paper from that house, that much is certain, and I wonder now when I will ever have occasion to use them. They’ve been waiting for their moment for so long.
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Photo: Distortable Me
I went for a walk this morning to capture some beautiful windows I have been noticing lately and also caught this fractured image of myself in the antique panes of the local Legion Hall.
And I Woke Up Happy
Last night I dreamt that my husband and I lived in a white clapboard house on an urban industrial street. Its pale painted interior held many of our current belongings but we had no children and had spent much of the summer away from it. We returned home one dusk to find a circular hole in the glass of a the outer metal door, and then the wooden inner door’s top window had a similar hole in its glass. There had been a break in and I mused that we should have used light timers while we were away. We found the place cleaned out of all electronics and art and clothes and books and stuff. I was annoyed but mostly dispassionate, while my beloved set about the task of getting our stuff back. It turned out to be surprisingly easy. We drove a truck down the street to a gray corrugated tin warehouse. I don’t know how we got in but when we did there was everything that was missing, piled along the warehouse walls. We began to load everything in the truck, and as we did I noticed a small cherry wood jewelry box shaped like a tiny chest of drawers. It was just like one I had given him for our fifth anniversary many years ago, and I became convinced that, though empty, it was the same box. The box was stolen from our real house during a break-in in 1997, and here it was now, among the things taken in the dream. We hurried to finish loading before the thieves came back, and I climbed into the passenger seat with the box in my lap, so relieved to have it back and wondering if we would return to the white clapboard house or move on to another place.
A Love of Bricks and Ivy
The stucco house I grew up in had ivy all around one side and I admit to being less charmed by it then because pigeons were always flying in and out of the ivy and dancing on the air conditioner in my window. But once I moved south to St. Louis and then out east I fell in love with the red right angles and the fluttering greens vying for attention, and there is nothing like the solid, cool interiors and dappled light of a brick house on a sunny day.
I drive by this house situated behind a wall on what was once a vast estate (now merely a large one) all the time but there is no safe place to stop and take the photo, so on this stunning May morning I parked the car in town and walked a mile to get this and many shots I have been meaning to take. More to come.
Spring Thaw, with a Vengeance
Last week the roiling Nashua River escaped its banks and pummeled the abandoned mill buildings it once powered. Ten inches of rain fell over two days during the second powerful storm to hit New England in a month, taking all of the season’s snow and the contents of many cellars with it. This mill wall, with it’s bricked up window and stars whose purpose elude me, says so much about how much we struggle to manage nature. Harnessing and fighting its power at the same time; eventually giving up and letting it loosen and take the bricks with it downstream, one at a time.
Winter Window, Ipswich
This is the cottage at the entrance to The Crane Estate in Ipswich, Massachusetts. The colors in the roof tiles, the curve of the wrought iron entwined with the ivy and the gnarled trees in the winter sky all remind me of a faded photograph from another time, even though I took this today.
Early American window and door, just because
This window is at the top corner of the Haines House in Concord, Massachusetts. Built in 1813, it has shutters are made to work and most likely has layers of paint thicker than the walls of most modern houses. Below is the front door to the same house (currently an academic administration building at Concord Academy), where the wiring for the light had to be routed on the outside. The way all the exterior lines and shapes in these old structures can fit together into a coherent whole fascinates me – in modern times that approach doesn’t seem to work nearly as well, and yet here, it does. Are we more forgiving of older architecture just because it’s old or did they get something right that we don’t? I admit that I am more enamored of such places from the outside looking in – once inside, they tend to be dark and cramped and have a kind of slanted fun house quality because everything has settled unevenly over the centuries (and that funky wiring goes from quaint to dangerous).
